The Death of the Floppy Disk 1049
vook writes "Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life. "
Quote from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
When is the death of "Death of..." articles going to come? They are usually wrong, and are always annoying.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
And when something is too large I burn it to a CDROM or DVDROM.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
-matthew
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Informative)
-matthew
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
System/crash recovery? Ever heard of Knoppix? Works like a dream. If you're wedded to MS, there is BartPE CD.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you create a bootable CD *and* write back to it?
CD emulation can be a problem, depending upon what you are trying to do.
Never, ever, buy/build a PC that does not have a floppy. MS wants to kill the floppy so they can control what you can boot. They already have the BIOS manufacturers in their pocket (most), and with DRM they will be able to influence the manafacturers to the point that you won't be able to boot Linux.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Funny)
Is that when you take a bootable cdrom (also know as an "El Torito") and roll it up?
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
A BIOS flasher saves the original first. This way if the flash fails, you can attempt again with the original. BIOS is read from flash on boot - after that, it's memory resident. If you misflash a BIOS, you're fine until you hit "reset".
You'd be a fool to flash a BIOS from a bootable CD-ROM.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
I would assume any OEM that was scrapping floppy support would have a BIOS that could handle USB boot.
The sooner slow, unreliable, huge 3.5 inch floppies are completely scrapped the better.
Post USB they have become an archiac format long past their use by date.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:4, Informative)
The floppy is still a very common method of transfering documentation between the home PC and a school PC. While the USB drive does hold more information, one can't assume that people or institutions will update their hardware to include USB ports. This will become a bigger problem though with PC's shipping without the floppy drive as a default configuration. I just sent my son to 6th grade and he requires two floppy disk. I've seen the hardware the school is working with and USB is not as common as the floppy drive. The floppy drive may be dying, but it will be a long slow death due to situations such as this.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Funny)
And what, exactly, is the right way to breathe on a floppy?
They make nice stopgaps though.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just got a new laptop for racecar support - brand spankin' new HP zd7280us with all the bells and whistles. P4-3.2. Monster 17" widescreen. DVD burner. USB ports up the yinyang. No floppy, no serial port.
The machine it replaces is a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25, a military-spec indestructable deal. P150. No CD burner, no USB - but a floppy drive.
99% of the software moved from one machine to the other was actually installed from scratch, so the lack of connectivity from one to the other wasn't all that big a deal. DATA, on the other hand, is proving to be a pain in the ass. It'd be SO simple to just zip it and dump it to floppy.....
Where I have a real bitch though is the deletion of the serial port from modern laptops. I found a USB-serial converter at RadioShack, but that's the last thing I wanted to do - further complicate my cabling. Grr. Don't the laptop people realize that the most popular way to connect widgets to computers (save printers) is via the serial port?
My phone uses a serial port. The ECU and datalogger on the race car uses the serial port. The scales, pyrometer, shock dyno, and every other measuring equipment I have all use the serial port. And in a pinch, a null-modem cable and ZMODEM makes for a decent file-transfer solution.
Grrr. I want my damn serial port back!
DG
Re:They make nice stopgaps though.... (Score:4, Informative)
Bluetooth natively shows up as one of several com ports to the computer. If you got REALLY happy, you could have one for the pyro, one for the scale, one for the datalogger.
Then you leave the laptop in the shade, within 30 feet of the pits and it talks to the datalogger when the driver brings the car in.
Serial connectivity with no add'l cables!
Re:They make nice stopgaps though.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Informative)
Heck, my SGI Indy from '93 can boot off a TFTP partition on the net. Very handy for a diskless workstation. AFAIK, the Mac can do this also.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:4, Informative)
Actually most newer computers can boot from USB jump drives, USB drivers, and even old systems and boot from CD. You don't need a Mac either. My WinTel P4 system can boot Zipslack off my 512mb jump drive just fine. Its actually just an option in the bios to enable boot from other devices. My last AMD system had this option too thought I never tested it with USB.
Oh and while no one uses them anymore, you can also boot off zip drives and all those odd little discs too.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
that can turn a Mac into an external harddisk for another computer. Can boot off of it and everything. Having stuff like that as part of the standard puts Apple years ahead of most PC manufacturers. The fact that we are still talking about floppies is case in point.
-matthew
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
apple was first and last (Score:4, Insightful)
apple was the first manufacturer to include a 3.5" floppy drive
on its machines -- in 1984. a 5.25" drive never existed as
an option on the macintosh -- they started their 1.0 machine
with 3.5" floppies (and was also y2k ready in 1984).
apple was also the first manufacturer to NOT include
a 3.5 drive on their machine -- the iMac in 1998.
because they've included being able to boot off a CD* on all
macs since the advent of the powerPC processor migration,
one of the main uses of the floppy on the PC side of things
(i.e. being able to boot a 3.5" floppy to restoring a PC system) --
on the mac, this use for the floppy was eliminated, and
burning CDs has now become the norm.
* you can create a bootable backup system CD on the mac,
just by dragging a system folder onto it before you burn it.
j [earthlink.net]
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Funny)
And how do you do that ???
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Funny)
And how do you do that ???
With a magnifying glass and a large pair of reading glasses. But you have to wait for a sunny day with a clear sky, and to make sure you have memorized the sequence of one's and zero's you want to burn. It's very easy to forget which block of data you were writing. And do be careful not to look towards the Sun when you're wearing your reading glasses.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
phone icons (Score:5, Interesting)
Never used floppies... (Score:5, Funny)
Turns out I'm right after all! Saved my self some bucks.
Though it takes about 2 hours now to just boot my computer off the cassette. And I won't even begin to tell ya how long it took to compile Gentoo.
You used tapes? (Score:5, Funny)
still, its tough when you break a nail or three compiling Gentoo. almost done now though.
Re:That can't be right (Score:5, Interesting)
Some fun reading
http://www.devili.iki.fi/Computers/Commodore/arti
There are signs that even the familiar 5-1/4-inch floppy disk may eventually go the way of punch cards and paper tape storage methods.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you buy a HDTV, you really see the limitations of video on DVD.
DVD is a shitty stop-gap format. I predict BluRay or HD-DVD to overtake it quickly.
A BluRay or HD-DVD player should come down in parity with the price of a regular DVD player very quickly. Just like the price of a DVD player got down close to that of a CD player quite quickly. The tech hasn't changed that much.
It didn't take long at all for DVD to KO videotape. It seemed like I read about this new video format, and overnight - everyone has a DVD player.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Even today, 20 years after the CD was introduced and 8 years after the DVD came out, the vast majority of 4-inch shiny disks are still CDs. Content producers only need to use the technology that's big enough for the task. Most software and music still fits on a CD, so they don't put them on DVDs.
Likewise, not everything is going to need as much data as a BluRay disk will hold, so CDs and/or DVDs will be used for those applications. Even for video, HD will probably used as a price differentiator for many years to come. Since HD will cost more, cheaper shows on standard-def DVDs will be around for a while. Additionally, anything that was originally produced on standard video tape will probably never come out on an HD format.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
DVD is a shitty stop-gap format. I predict BluRay or HD-DVD to overtake it quickly.
Replace predict with hope...
It'll still be decades before a signifigant percentage of the population has HD televisions. Once that hits 40 or 50%, sure some HD format will quickly overtake DVD, but how long do you think it will be before half of us replace our televisions with HD models?
See you in 10 years.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll tell you one thing, Joe Schmoe is not going to spend $1500+ on a HDTV with that $200 TV sitting on the shelf just down the aisle.
Windows installs from bootable CD (Score:3, Informative)
Journalists should listen to industry leaders. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Apple become the first mass-market computer manufacturer to stop including floppy drives altogether with the release of their iMac model in 1998."
then it said....
"Bill Gates recently predicted the DVD would be obsolete within a decade."
Obvious, really, but shouldn't they be listening to Apple, if they were the first to really see such a trend in the market and drop the floppy? Since when has Microsoft, or Bill Gates, *led* the industry in anything new?
"This just in! IBM builds the best stuff in the world, but let's interview Tandy PC makers for their opinion instead!".
The rational for such logic escapes me.
Also, the title of the article should have been "The SLOW death of the floppy disk." It wasn't until USB flash drives came out that people felt comfortable with replacing their floppy. (IMHO)
Does SP2 cause bovine lesbianism? [theregister.co.uk]
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
cd aren't a viable replacement for that purpose either due to them being so slow to read to, requiring a special device (cd writer) and not always working as boot devices either (im guessing due to the spin up delay)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, 'cause floppies are so fast...
Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple did have the right idea, they just implemented it poorly.
Most everyone who purchased the original iMac went out and purchased an external USB floppy drive as well. The problem was people didn't have a way to reliabley back up their documents since the original iMacs did not come with a CD-RW, but rather with a basic read-only CD drive. This, in my opinion, was a huge mistake. People don't like to have a computer that is
And as usual, Apple is the pioneer (Score:5, Insightful)
The first company to realize that the floppy was dead, and that it was time to wisely move consumers away from it.
(Not to mention the first computers[1] to include USB, FireWire, etc. - and wise enough to eliminate ancient legacy ports at the same time.)
Many consumers weren't *ready* to give up floppies in 1998, but it was more out of fear than actual need. The PC industry even played into that fear with the iMac, scaring customers with it's lack of a floppy drive. And 5 years later, the PC industry followed along. Hmm, 5 years...that seems about right...
[1] Yes, yes, someone will come up with some retarded example about some other obscure thing that was "first", but let's face it: Apple was the first to mainstream technologies in so many of these realms. "First" to 802.11? No, but the first to force prices of access points down from over $1000 to under $300, and cards from $300 to under $100, and to include integrated wireless in its laptops and desktops...and then everyone else followed in earnest a couple years later. "First" to 64-bit on the desktop? No, but some random company someone has never heard of ("BOXX TECHNOLOGIES") doesn't really count, and Apple's G5 orders far eclipsed any other 64-bit *desktop* offering from any vendor the first day it was introduced. "First" to an online music store? No, but the first one to receive widespread press and the first one to not completely and utterly blow that normal people can (and actually do) use. Let's face the facts: like it or not, Apple is the innovator here, and one of very, very few in the industry.
Re:And as usual, Apple is the pioneer (Score:5, Funny)
I know things have been tough for Digital Equipment Corporation since they were bought out, but this is the first time I have heard them described as "some random company someone has never heard of".
Re:DEC? Ha! (Score:4, Interesting)
2) All the people who bought their Alpha desktop systems, I suppose. DEC sold desktop systems for at least 15-20 years. Everything from the MicroVAX, to Multia, to the real horsepower of their multi-processor Alpha desktops. They certainly were selling systems designed specifically as 64-bit desktops ten years ago. I had several of them. The DEC Multia for example was really the Dec UDB (Universal Desktop Box)... so someone seemed to consider them that.
3) Thats just rediculous. DEC was building desktop computers before Jobs et al were even in school. Ever hear of the PDP-8? That was a desktop system in the mid 60's. Designed for the desktop, purchased for the desktop, and used on the desktop as a personal computer.
MINC, GIGI, Rainbow, DEBmate, MicroVAX, MicroPDP, the whole VAXstation line, The whole DECstation line, the whole AlphaStation line, the higher end VT terminals, multia, The InfoServer product... how many more desktop systems ought we list?
Re:And as usual, Apple is the pioneer (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure getting rid of old cruft is "innovative". If so then the definition of the word has been stretched a fair bit from what it used to be.
Anyway, who cares? One mans "innovation" is anothers backwards compatibility. Floppy drives are so cheap, that it's really not a big deal if you include one. Given that some people may find them useful, what's the benefit to taking them out? Hell th
Re:And as usual, Apple is the pioneer (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, this is getting pretty OT, but who cares of Apple was the first to do anything? It doesn't matter what came first -- what matters is what is best, what is best supported, and what will be the longest lived. Perfect example: the Tivo. The Tivo was first, and is still a great product...however, it's pretty widely held by analysts that they will eventually go away. Every cable and satellite provider in the country will offer a similar product bundled with their service -- Tivo won't be able to compet
You seem to have missed my first sentence... (Score:3, Informative)
The first company to ship and popularize Sony's revolutionary 3.5" hard-case floppy drives and disks...
Re:And as usual, Apple is the pioneer (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree, but let's go on the assumption that that's correct.
They now have the G5 iMac. You don't get much more of a "desktop system" than the iMac, and it's now 64-bit. And 64-bit processors on the x86 side of things don't seem to have gained any traction in the last 14 months or so.
It's about time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's about time... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's about time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if you buy "fresh" floppys off the shelf today, odds are good that those were manufactured ten years ago. The floppy market saw some revival with the introduction of colored cases, but you can only dress up a lost cause so much. Besides, it's only a matter of time before the competing technologies edge you out that way too.
I don't fault floppies for a 50% failure rate. After all, they were never meant to last for decades, and it's not like there's been enough demand to gurantee that even newly purchased floppys aren't ancient. If fault could be assigned, it's on the lack of retailers / producers to account for on shelf spoilage in their business practices.
Re:It's about time... (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry... (Score:5, Insightful)
floppy RAID! (Score:5, Funny)
Is (was) it my imagination ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now what I remember from the few times I used floppies the last five years is that invariabily almost half of them would be rotten in no time sharp, giving read errors and all kinds of data loss. Could it be that the quality of floppies or floppy drives slipped, anticipating the ultimate demise of the floppy?
Re:Is (was) it my imagination ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it. How much does a box of 10 floppies cost now, versus ten years ago when they were still good quality? You have to sacrifice
As soon as I can... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until then, though, floppy drives cost $10. I will put one in each compute I build.
(or, alternately, I'll buy the $29 combo floppy drive w/ USB media reader)
Re:As soon as I can... (Score:3, Informative)
You can, there's more to it than that though - for many higher end RAID controllers, you can save and restore the array configuration to... a floppy. This is from the RAID array BIOS program.
Why, you ask? Well, RAID BIOS can talk to the int 13 device, but not a CDROM or the like. Therefore - no USB, no CD-xxx, no DVD+-xx, just good ole floppies. (There's no OS running at this point, so no drivers to load - your OS is on that RAID controlled stripe set anyways)
And if you're ever playing around with array
not yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not yet. (Score:5, Informative)
Same for serial ports ... (Score:5, Insightful)
In someway this is OK, but there will and should always remain a small segment of the market devoted to (a correct implementation of!) these "obsolete" technologies to make sure applications relying on them can still be debugged in the future...
Way of the horse.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Floppies will die only when... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Floppies will die only when... (Score:3, Insightful)
The only problem I see with this is USER-acceptance. I believe the past two versions of the linux kernel, Windows, and MacOS support the USB Key just fine. However, the problem lies not in the manufactures of the OS, but the user's inability to upgrade their Windows 95/NT machines despite it being a 10 year old OS.
4. ALL OEMs stop relying on floppies for ANYTHING (Dell for example)
This is a problem that relies on the manufacturer of the ke
bad sectors ? Copy the data on multiple FD (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it going to be the same for CD as they get older ? I am considering moving my data archive from CD to hard drives with RAID.
Ah this reminds me of this story : http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm [8k.com]
This is news?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally wouldn't rely on the a floppy disk any more to backup or transfer information, the number of times I've tried to read a floppy disk and my computer has turned around and said there was something wrong with it. It amazes me that people will keep the only copy of their very important piece of work on a floppy disk! I wouldn't even keep the only copy of an important piece of work on my hard drive!
I can't remember the last time that I used a floppy disk, in fact, I don't even know why I've still got a floppy disk drive (except the fact that I'd have a strange and pointless floppy disk shaped hole in the front of my computer!).
CDR screwup delayed floppy death (Score:5, Insightful)
CDRW's should have been drag and drop write/erase like any other media since day one, and if they couldnt do it on day one, then day two. But this is what, year 5? It's why ZipDrives, even at their insane failure rates and price per meg are still popular with many people, because they've performed the miracle of "being able to drag and drop and erase from it". What's so hard about making that happen with Windows/Linux even at the very lowest level (as in, from a command line, safe mode, whatever).
Re:CDR screwup delayed floppy death (Score:3, Interesting)
This is something I don't understand either. I bought like 4 or 5 years ago my first CD-RW drive, Philips CD3660 (2x/2x/6x) and THAT came with Ahead InCD, allowing for packet writing. Just format
Re:CDR screwup delayed floppy death (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not supported because CD-RW packet writing is incredibly fucked up. It has a limited number of writes before the disc becomes unusable. It doesn't have error correction. It's slow. The standard filesystem, UDF version 2.0 does not lay out efficiently on CD (lots of preallocated space required for block sparing), and, due to the way partition works, requires you to blur the distinction between the filesystem and the driver layer. And have you ever read the UDF standards document? Good luck parsing the UDF document itself, let alone the incredibly obtuse ECMA volume format standard on which it's based.
The Mt Rainier standard fixes some of this by offloading it into hardware, but you can still only rewrite a CD-RW sector 999 times before the sector goes bad.
Add in the fact that CD-R media is cheaper than CD-RW media. It's easier, cheaper, and more reliable to use a ton of CD-Rs than to use a few CD-RW discs.
"X is dead," "X-killer," etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
One is the "thus-and-such is dead" meme. First of all, who cares? Most technologies experience very slow declines. The floppy became "dead" for me when I bought a PowerMac G4 in 2000 which didn't include a floppy drive, and at the instance when I decided I didn't to spend $89 for an an add-on external floppy drive. But it's still "alive" for my wife because the Win98 box she bought at about the same time has one.
Why should anyone bother to try to declare the exact point at which some slowly-declining technology is "dead?" Usually, it is motivated by some company that hopes to influence consumers to stop using it. I notice the reporter spoke to Dell and Gateway. Very likely there are product managers at those companies responsible for some models that don't have floppies, who are annoyed that those pesky customers persist in buying floppy-equipped models instead and hoping this article will influence consumers.
The other one is the phrase "X-killer." This always seems to be traceable to marketing and sales and is never close to being true. The "X-killers" never have more than a rough similarity to the product they're supposed to be killing. Let me see, which IBM product was supposed to be the "VAX-killer?" Adobe InDesign was said to be a "Quark killer" when it was introduced in... when? 2001? Indeed Quark is experiencing what looks like a long slow, painful decline, due mostly to self-inflicted wounds, partly as a result of outsourced software development that neither succeeded brilliantly nor failed utterly, and somewhat due to InDesign... but the process is taking years and years and years.
Not convinced (Score:5, Interesting)
I just built a (screaming) athlon system that included SATA. However, the SATA drivers were not availble when installing Windows (Linux isn't an option for me at this point) off of the XP CD. So I had to load an external driver using... You guessed it, a floppy.
I had actually considered not buying a floppy for the machine, but I did "just in case". If I hadn't, I wouldn't be able to get the machine working until I went out and bought one.
~D
The REAL reason for floppy's demise (Score:5, Interesting)
(Actually, that's only *half* humor.)
More seriously, I recently bought floppies for my kids to take data to and from school. Schools seldom have *new* equipment, CDRWs are finicky for older drives, and as someone else said, you hate to burn a CDR for memtest86. Kids' reports are smaller than that, even with multisession. KISS.
The only thing I'd miss (Score:4, Informative)
Currently AFAIK the only choice is that, or a full CD with all the ports.
Wish there was a CD image for an FTP install you can download so you don't need three or four hours to download the ISO...
=D
Not quite a dupe (Score:5, Funny)
(I'll head off the obvious response now: "2001 called, it wants its joke back." Thank you, I'm here all week.)
What about apps that must boot from a floppy? (Score:3, Informative)
I finally bought a laptop at the start of this year and it came without an internal floppy drive. OK, I said, I don't really use one all that much. What could possibly go wrong?
I hit my first snag that evening when I was trying to use Partition Magic to generate my dual-boot partition (Linux). PM cannot repartition the drive opon which it is running, so I needed to create a floppy set for booting off of and partitioning from. With no ready method to do so, and no easy way (at that time) to generate a bootable CD, it was back to the BestFutureCircuitFry store to get a USB external floppy
I must admit that the floppy is almost never used, but it's nice to have it around when needed. I make use of it when working with paritions or ghosting drives. Without the external floppy, it would be difficult to do either.
It is my opinion that, unless an OS comes with the ability to create a bootable CD with the same ease that one could previously create a bootable diskette, then the diskette will not be devoid of value or usefulness. Until Bill has a "create emergency boot CD" option alongside (or in place of) the "create boot Diskette" option, then MS-Windows will still require the occasional use of a floppy drive.
I also know that it's possible to create a bootable USB key, but it's not easy enough yet (for the average user), and most people don't have a box of USB keys around like they would a box of diskettes or a spool of CD blanks.
Now, what to do with my cases of 5.25" floppies. And the two 8" Elelephant disks that I have, since the IMSA got donated.
This is pretty ironic... (Score:3, Informative)
Last week I needed it. And I discovered that it was broken.
I was trying to install, of all things, Win95 with VMWare to test something. Since the disc isn't bootable, I had to use the floppy drive just to put dos on it first. First I had to *find* a copy of dos...luckily a coworker still had a set. Then I discovered the drive was busted. And for some reason, VMWare wouldn't acknowledge the new USB floppy drive as "B:". Lots of cursing and threats, and finally got it working by *networking* the floppy drive off my Linux machine, which I couldn't spare to swap the drive from.
In short, it's 2004, and not only are floppies *not* completely removed from my geek life, neither is dos!
The only upshot is that I could play nibbles.bas again.
Dead, But Not Replaced (Score:5, Interesting)
ZIP drives, well, not cheap and not small, and not widely built-in by box builders and (some think) not all that reliable.
CD-RW, well, not small, and the software was not built-in until Windows XP, and even that software is "one big burn" and doesn't let you copy/delete individual files one at a time so you can use it "like a floppy" and (some think) not all that reliable.
Then we come to USB disk-on-key. Small, software already mostly built-in, random access, can be used "like a floppy". Not real fast, but probably works pretty good for many floppy-like applications. But will it work for data backup? Most people aren't aware that the technology there tolerates a quite limited number of rewrites. Will people be happy when they discover their $50 USB dongle fails after less than a year of daily backups?
When it comes to making casual backups, the battle to replace the floppy is still ongoing. Maybe there'll never be a clear winner, or maybe it's going to be one of these technologies [elecdesign.com].
Three things are killing the floppy... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Bootable CDs are filling the niche for system recovery. Used to be I always had a boot floppy with me to recover systems. Now I carry a bootable credit card CD with a lot more tools on it.
3. Floppy quality is going down. The last box of floppies that I bought, I threw away about 30%! Not only that, I've noticed that they don't seem to hold files like they used to. I write a file on floppy, check it two weeks later and the file is unreadable. I format the floppy and come up with 200k of bad sectors when previously there were none.
The extra layer (Score:4, Interesting)
an extra layer of security for small files,
I want to kept from prying eyes.
Simply because you don't see many of them
these days, and most the one's you do
see are homes for giant dust bunnies!
In another ten years...I may say the same
thing about 3 1/2" floppies, however some
of the old 5 1/4" drives are built like a
tank, while the 3 1/2" drives as of late
most are junk.
USB flash drives (Score:4, Informative)
Death to floppies! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing: Floppies suck.
Don't agree? Too bad, they still suck
From a guy who spent the middle part of the 90's working in a college computer lab, I can't tell you how many kids would come in with a floppy telling me that they couldn't get the only copy of their final paper (or worse, their thesis) off of their floppy disk. I had to tell them "tough tacos", that their data was lost, and they should have backed it up to something. The Zip drives, also floppy magnetic media, were just as bad (if not worse...with the click of death and all). The fact is that floppy disks are a horribly unreliable storage medium...combined with their low transfer rate and incredibly low storage density, they downright suck ass. Some people whine about the longetivity of CD's -- however, due to the frailty of floppy disks, I believe this is a moot argument. (You lose your data if you breathe on floppies wrong!) The people who support floppies because they're "convenient" and it's the only thing they know how to use...I hate to say it, but they sorta deserve to lose their data. Why should we have to suffer (and/or buy crappy technology) because floppies are convenient for some folks?
As far as needing bootable floppies for things like BIOS updates -- floppy advocates may have a point here. I still keep one floppy drive around for this purpose. However, under most circumstances, I'll make a boot floppy on the one system that has a floppy, then burn it to a bootable CD. This way, I won't have to shuffle that drive around. Some will complain that burning a CD is a waste of space and money. I reject that argument because unless you're still using your free AOL floppies from the mid 90's, CDR/RW's are just as cheap as floppies (if not cheaper). Outside of the per-disk cost, on a cost-per-MB basis, it's an absolute no-brainer. Even if you waste 96% of the space on a CD, you're still making off better than you would with a floppy.
Anyway, the end is near for this technology. It's not quite here yet, because manufacturers are still updating bios' with floppies. There are ways around them, but until manufacturers start shipping CD ISO's, these are still hacks. I welcome the demise of floppy technology with open arms. Now, when will analog modems go this way too?
Dead but still necessary (Score:4, Informative)
Windows XP, installs, for instance, STILL have to laod driver extras (RAID, SCSI, etc) from a floppy at boot -- even if the computer in question doesn't have one.
Companies such as Dell often package their driver and BIOS releases only onto floppy disk images; it's damn near impossible to pull out these files and install them from the hard drive or CD. That drives me nuts, but it happens.
So I keep a couple of old drives, cables and all, hanging around in a box, and I plug 'em in to the desktop systems when needed. Luckily my laptop has never needed one... I'd feel just plain silly going out and buying a USB floppy drive these days.
Floppys (and audio tapes) (Score:4, Interesting)
Another problem is that most of the university lab computers are old and do not have USB. Some boot from CD, some do not. With education budgets so slim, upgrading is much more expensive than adding a floppy drive. And it means you can always boot to DOS.---- I still use 3 1/2 inch floppys about once a week. (I finally am in the process of transfering programs from 5 1/4 floppys to CD. What do you do with about 300 5 1/4 inch floppys? - Ebay?)
I read that some people report problems with reading floppys on different machines. Floppys are factory adjusted to position the head in the middle of the track. Some do not do a very good job. Interestingly enough, most of the grad students I work with, use Zip drives.
A few weeks ago I had to record a wedding ceremony. I went to Walmart and found only RCA and TDK audio tapes in packages of 5 or 6. I have not noticed portable CD recorders to replace the audio recorders. Am I missing something?
Recent experience with XP and SATA (Score:4, Informative)
XP doesn't have any SATA drivers, and the only way Microsoft has seen fit to present extra drivers to the normal install is through a floppy drive. Nothing else works. Another CD? nope. A USB key drive? sorry.
The only way around this that I've found is to "slipstream" the drivers into the normal install on CD. This involves a complicated process of ripping the content of the original XP install CD, hacking into various files, modifying the directory structure and rebuilding another bootable CD-rom from the result.
It cannot be done unless you have access to another computer with a CD burner and the right software (that can produce a bootable CD), and if your version of the XP medium is provided by a third party vendor like DELL or IBM, chances are even this process won't work.
In other words it makes installing Debian on the same machine a walk in the park in comparison.
Search google for "slipstream SATA drivers XP" if you want to know the gory details.
Still waiting for a good floppy replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Read/write is transparent. The burning step for CDRW is terrible; you should be able to directly open, save, and erase files just like any other drive. Then you don't need to copy files to your harddrive to work on them and then back again when you're done; that eventually invites confusion. The most prevalent network transfer protocols require separate download/upload steps.
2) The media is physically robust. Unlike CD's, a protective case isn't critical for floppies. Floppies do not start flaking out after being scratched a number of times. They're easier to transport and share -- I can put them in a backpack and run around all day without the flimsy plastic case breaking. And the fact you can write on them with a normal pen increases usefulness too: labelling is really helpful for yourself and essential for sharing.
And unlike USB drives, floppies have a standardized size, so you can stack them and store them in standardized cases.
3) The media is cheap, which facilitates sharing. USB drives cost lots of money; to give your data to someone you can't just hand them a spare drive. Floppies, even the older high quality ones, are cheap enough to give away.
With cheap media, you can afford to use a labelled disk as a unit of classification -- you don't need to fill up the disk to get your money's worth. USB drives can't do this (yet).
Expensive drives inside computers paired with cheap disks is much better than expensive combined disk+drives that can be swapped between computers. A good universal physical medium should be usable on all computers; it's not like the act of transferring files is something that only the rare person with a usb stick wants to do. You should only have to have a cheap disk to transfer files; you should not have to invest in a special drive.
To transfer files I once had to go around knocking on doors, looking for someone with a USB drive. This is ridiculous. (I am more likely to have a spare floppy, or only have to go knocking around for a floppy!)
4) Media reading/writing is (was) universal. CD drives are universal, but not always for writing. USB is pretty good now, but it can be a pain to find the plug in the back of the machine; I've also had weird OS hangups on certain systems (esp. older windows). Networks aren't always available in all environments -- especially figuring out which server or transfer protocol to use that will work for your particular situation.
Universality was definitely a bane of Zip drives and other floppy replacements -- a media type is useful only if everyone else has it.
5) They're dead easy to use. The CD burn step and usb issues were mentioned above. Further, network transfers are a pain. I've had the most annoying experiences just figuring out how to network transfer a file from one computer to another. Maybe you can upload/download via ftp -- if you have a server around, and you even know what ftp is? Maybe use email -- which requires extra space in someone's mailbox, and through web interfaces is often even clunkier than ftp? And the login steps are definitely extraneous. Store on a network drive -- if you have a server available nearby? Computers still can't universally detect each other's presence and sling around individual files without depending on some remote server. The easiest and most common way to transfer files I've observed on campus is to have an AOL IM signon on each computer, then use its file transfer mechanism. This is ridiculous. If files still fit on floppies this situation would be so much easier.
Obviously, it's possible to solve the peer-to-peer transfer problem via better and more universal pr
Re:Again (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Again (Score:4, Insightful)
Get a USB key (under $30). Let me know next time you need a floppy disk.
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
Get a USB key (under $30). Let me know next time you need a floppy disk.
Until most computers have a USB port on the front (every computer I use regularly has them on the back; I even use a few machines that are
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Again (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Again - Windows NT (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Again (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I can transfer data using CD-RW, and CD-R/CD-RW can be used too boot a computer. But it's magnitudes more effort to put data on them than to put it on floppy.
Yes, I could use an USB stick. But the USB ports are all at the back of my bcomputer (that's different with newer computers), and I
Re:Again (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone talks about CD-Rs and keychain drives replacing floppies, but I believe the network sealed the fate of the floppy long before keychain drives became popular.
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
All the BIOSes I've used in the last few years have allowed me to boot from "other" devices (USB keys and hard drives,) and booting from CD-ROM has been available for much
Re:Again (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that a flopy drive in day to day use is pretty silly, but when it comes down to it, a good old custom dos floppy, and custom slackware rescue floppy, I can diagnose just about any ailment a computer may have. Especially in a world of SCSI CDRom drives that I tend to deal with, booting a "rescue" cd isnt always possible... at least not without a boot floppy first.
Re:Again (Score:4, Funny)
So the poison in her tea didn't work, then, eh?
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
Before a couple years ago, I put them in machines but didn't use them. In fact on the rare instance when someone gave me a floppy disk, it never worked because the drive was full of dust.
Basically it came down to having to buy a new floppy drive every time I needed to use a floppy (about once a year or so). Sometimes I could just vacuum them out. Finally I just
Western-Centric outlook (Score:3, Insightful)
The article may have wanted to take that into account.
Re:Again (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, when I installed GNU/Linux on it, I had a quad-speed CD-ROM attached with a Debian boot CD. After installation, I removed it and have been updating over the network ever since.
Windows never got installed, the price of a license is just too steep for casual use.
Re:Drugs to help (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great, next one in line ... (Score:3, Informative)
Ma, I'm gonna have to put the floppy down (Score:3, Funny)