The End of a Floppy Era

An anonymous reader writes This article is an editorial on the end of the floppy and the rise of more portable, more efficient data storage." Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery. Talk about your long term enterprise data storage. Some of those buggers made it thousands of years!

Not gone...

[ginotech]

I still outfit every computer i build with a floppy. Only 10 bucks, and you never know when it'll come in handy.

New Format

[Antimatter3009]

So what's the new format for booting into DOS to flash my video card BIOS?

Not so for sysadmins

[eck06]

To me, there's still nothing quite like a cheap, simple, effective floppy to bootstrap with (e.g. etherboot) in a large computing environment.

Boot From Floppy

[p0]

They are just handy to do booting related stuff. What if the CDROM is broken? Floppies just work! And USB boot? I havent tried that and I doubt their effectiveness over floppies

I want my 5 minutes back

[kevmo]

This article was just another worthless piece of bad journalism in the genre of "The end of X". This guy is ranting like people need to stop using floppies, but thats pretty much already happened. A lot of people I know don't even have floppy drives. Cheap optical media and USB drives have all but replaced it.

Even at my mom's office, where they are very backwards about technology, they use zip drives over floppy drives.

I'm anxiously looking forward to reading the authors article on the "The End of the A-Track Era" /sarcasm

Keep the floppy

[Anonymous Coward]

Advantages of floppies over USB:
* They can be removed without an unmount procedure.
* They are essentially free, whereas I need to get my USB drives returned.
* They don't autorun stuff when inserted.
* Works with Windows 98 (25% of the desktop market)
* They are bootable (handy when debugging a computer)
* Works with DOS (handy when debugging a computer)

For $10, I'll keep my floppy drive, thank you.

No logical replacement, though

[mrRay720]

What have we got in terms of removable media though?

CD? certainly cheap, and at a guess 50% of computers now have them, but they are BIGGER than what they're replacing. Probably not as durable for day-to-day usage, either. FAIL

DVD? Well a much better replacement option than CD, were it not for the fact that probably only 10% of comnputers have them. Less durable that CD, with compatability issues still lingering on older equipment. FAIL

ZIP? Dead. Dead

USB memory sticks? Probably usable by 95%+ at least. Most are compatible alternative (well the ones using standard mass storage drivers anyway), but there are price issues. The cheapest ones are an order of magnitude or two more expensive than floppys/CDs/DVDs. Higher capacity ones (650MB-4.7GB) are A LOT more expensive than the alternative replacements, CDs and DVDs.

Portable HD? Great capacity, compatability, capacity/price ratio, but an even higher minimum price than the thumbdrives.

All other options just have no real benefits over the alternatives listed above and/or have a pathetic tiny market share.

Why did the industry fail so horribly in coming up with a cheap and easy floppy replacement? Perhaps there's just far less need for it now that so many PCs are connected via the internet or local LAN.

Is it "Floppy is dead" or "removable mass media is dead"?

did a 12-year old write that article for school?

[theStorminMormon]

All comments about floppy disks aside, that has to be the worst-written article I have ever read ever. Did no one else notice the appalling style?

Re:Not gone...

[Nytewynd]

My mobo floppy interface died on me somehow. I wanted to Raid 0 two drives with Win XP on that machine, but couldn't load the drivers for the windows install without the floppy drive. I tried several floppy drives and cables before deciding that the mobo just wasn't working. The only option in the windows install is to put the disk in drive A:. You can't use a CD. My other option was to slipstream the install CD with the drivers. I am way to lazy for that, so I decided to just keep the 2 drives separate.

I hate floppy drives with a passion now. Whenever I have to make a driver floppy, I get a fiery rage in my midsection. What is wrong with companies? Haven't they heard of this new thing called a "compact disc"? You can put stuff on it, and then use it later.

The only floppy drive I have that really works now is the modular one for my laptop. My web server doesn't have one at all, and the one in my primary PC doesn't work. The only floppies I own are the ones from about 10 years ago that I have formatted and reused. I mostly use the old Office disks. The last install before CD was something like 15 floppy disks. Now they contain all kinds of random stuff from Scorched Earth to drivers for things that I don't even have anymore.

Re:New Format

[FullMetalAlchemist]

Sorry if I come off as a complete ass wanker, but have you considered building your own OEM Installation CD with the console-drivers integrated?

Re:Not gone...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Likewise, my new machine circa 2002 didn't get one. (Actually, it was more because I couldn't undo a couple of the small screws from my previous machine's drive, or it would have done as a "just in case" precaution. D'oh.)

I gather there are a few niches where floppies are still necessary; someone was telling me something about SATA drivers for some OSes in a previous Slashdot discussion, and I'm never quite sure about Windows recovery disks and such. However, it seems either a CD-based or USB-based alternative is available for things like emergency booting and back-ups these days, and the greater capacity and physical robustness makes them much more suitable. I can't say I've missed the floppy drive with my current PC.

Re:Not gone...

[phasm42]

The media is a lot cheaper, and support is near universal.

Re:Not gone...

[harrkev]

Load the RAID driver on a fresh install of XP. I admit that this is a windows failing, though...

Floppies are also useful for mobo firmware updates. Creating a bootable CD-Rom just for a firmware update is a bit of a pain. Bootable floppies are very easy.

Sensationalists rant on!

[radiotyler]

People are willing to pay good money for a retro cassette drive [thinkgeek.com] for their computers right now to gain points with the geek crowd.

Wait a minute; I'm going to sell my "crap box" full of floppy drives on eBay for the retro crowd. I'll soon be a thousandaire. Or at least a hundredaire.

Only a partial death

[lightyear4]

I can certainly hear the death knell ringing in the distance, but as with all legacy equipment, the floppy will never quite die. In repairing computers for the past ten or so years, I have been required to use a floppy with, paradoxically, increasing frequency. Boot cds are wonderful, but many times older equipment (the stuff that fails that I'm being asked to troubleshoot) just cannot handle them; some require a floppy to due to the nonexistent bios booting option; others are of great use simply because old software, well written, will never pass away. Surely those of you who do data recovery and forensics have loads of such tools at your disposal?

Floppies have served us well, and at least some of us will be using them for some time to come.

Loading Computers (Images)

[dlhm]

Floppies are still usefull for loading computers either by copying the CD source to the HD first or for Imaging a HD. What About HD Diagnostics? Do you really want to have to create a bootable CD everytime you want to do this? I think floppies are still easier to use for alot tech and loading issues, just because you can't use them as a long term data storage anymore, doesn't mean they are dead, there usage has just change from a mainly user role to more of an admin/tech role.

Re:Not gone...

[Ours]

Actually, it's quite ironic that I purchased a brand new top of the line computer and I had to dig hard to find a floppy so that I could put the SATA drivers on them in order to install Windows XP x64. Before that it was a very long time I haven't used a floppy (and I was damn happy about it too). I hope that OS'es start supporting USB drives and CDs (if the CD-ROM is not on the SATA bus like my case) to read the SATA drivers on install. It seems stupid to link such very recently built OS (Windows XP x86 = 2005) to such an old device.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Stupidity, repeated

[gweihir]

The floppy is the only easily writable medium today that you can reliably boot a PC from. USB storage is still not there yet. CD/DVD/etc is not writable in any HDD/floppy-like sense. That is the reason why countless utilities (BIOS iupdata, HDD diagnose, ramtest, disk-imagers, desaster recovery, ....) are available on floppies.
Until something as compatible and universal as the floppy is around, removing it is just plain stupid. I am quite anoyed at the people that have predicted the death of the floppy again and again for several years now.

Re:I realise I couldn't remember if I had a drive

[iainl]

So you can't have flash sticks in the building, but you are allowed to take a stack of floppies around?

You're right, that _is_ insane network security.

Who cares?

[east coast]

Dead? As in obsolete? Obsolete is just a word. Get over it. Floppies will not die until the last person who ever puts on in a PC decides it's not worth it anymore. There is no debate and frankly if you're losing sleep over this issue maybe it is you that is obsolete.

If a Commodore 64 is what it takes to get you where you're going than a Commodore 64 is still a viable machine, if your needs are fulfilled by a floppy than a floppy is still viable storage.

Re:Not gone...

[chris_mahan]

If you want cheap, get a DLT tape (http://www.tapeandmedia.com/Super_DLT_Tape_II_Qua ntum.asp [tapeandmedia.com])
you can store 600gig (encrypted) for $89.95.

that comes to 0.015 cents per meg, or $0.00015 per meg. Cheaper than hard drives.

What his point is that you can just hand someone a floppy and say: "enjoy", and not care about getting the floppy back.

Bootability?

[tepples]

A 128MB USB stick costs about $25 which is about the same cost as a floppy disk drive, plus 100 floppies and a damn sight more convenient.

And a damn sight less bootable when troubleshooting older machines.