Is the floppy disk dead?

[jcarle]

A physical floppy drive is useful for certain things, such as making disk images, but there is not much use left to them. Their small capacity and electromagnetic sensitivity have made them a thing of the past.

[Tripredacus]

We still use them at work, but I haven't used one at home since I had to use my good old Windows 98 CD-ROM Boot Disk (the XP cd wouldn't boot for some reason).

[Thunderbolt 2864]

I could care less if floppies go. They fail all the time and its annoying. Flash USB sticks are the future, floppy drives are the past.

[Access Denied]

I could care less about them, after the masses failing, that I have tossed using for F6 disks over the last 5 years. I use nLite or will use vLite if my next motherboard is not supported like this current one. I have a USB floppy drive, in a drawer/box collecting dust, for good reason, lol.

[Andromeda43]

Well, if nothing else, a thread like this sure separates the men from the boys.

Or the tech's from the nerds and geeks.

As a working tech, I find all sorts of uses for the humble little floppy disk.

I carry a set of utilities on floppies with me on every service call. Of course

I still work on lots of older computers that still have floppy drives in them.

One nice thing about having things on floppies, is you can stop and edit a

batch file if you need to alter something....you can't do that on a CD.

Also you can drop a floppy on the floor or handle it while eating a Hershey

Bar and not corrupt it, like you would with a CD.

I just built a new 'Super System' to test Vista Ultimate. I installed a 3.5"

Floppy Drive in it. I was going to put two of them in there....but I found

out that the bios will only support the A: drive and NOT the B: drive.

Go Figure!

So, the second 3.5" slot is now sporting a multi-card reader and USB port.

(waste not, want not)

In my 'Kit' I also carry a USB Floppy Drive. I use it often and sell about one

a month to a customer who has just bought a new computer with NO

floppy drive in it and still wants to use their old disks with data files and family

pictures on them.

When loading XP, it still stops to ask you for a special drivers "Floppy" to load

SATA or SCSI drivers. I never could coax it into accepting a CD instead of a

floppy disk. I guess that M$ hasn't heard that floppies are Dead.

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?

B)

[DigeratiPrime]

probably should create a poll asking when or how often you use a floppy. Maybe once a year here for some random problem.

[[deXter]]

For all practical purposes, they are dead.

However, I'm sad that we never saw a good replacement for the floppy disk. I mean it was universal - you could boot off it, read/write without any fuss, worked in all PCs that had a floppy drive.. I mean the only problem with floppies was that it was unreliable. Sure, you can have bootable CDs, but it isn't the same as a bootable floppy - you can't write back to the CD you booted from. CDRWs and DVDRWs are even more unreliable than floppies were. USB/flash drives - very promising, but unfortunately, booting doesn't work in half the PCs, and there's no straightforward way to make them bootable. Those days were truly the portable ages. In just a single floppy disk I used to carry an OS and plenty of other tools - no installation needed, no fuss. If someone'd have told me it'd end up like this today, I'd be in disbelief. We spend more time fixing, setting up and configuring the computer and trying to learn new things about the computer itself, instead of getting the real work done. How did we get into this mess?

--

I still keep a bunch of floppies, but I use it only for demonstration purposes - most of them are bad or dead, but I bring them alive by using SpinRite - I use them to demonstrate the power of SpinRite. You should really watch it in action when it's trying to recover data from a bad sector - you can actually see the contents of your file slowly being recovered, live! And the Flux Reversal Synthesis graph never fails to amaze people!

Edited May 2, 2007 by [deXter]

[#rootworm]

death to floppies. i've always hated the **** things. even when i bought the best game on earth (doom shareware) on floppies i hated them.

the only thing floppies are good for is boot sector virii.

re: dexter

i built my system years ago and i've always been able to boot from usb/flash drives. also, it takes me 5 minutes to install an app/game and then run it these days. back in DOS days i'd have to spend an hour making a custom config.sys and autoexec.bat for the stuff i wanted to run depending on if they used EMS or not and how much conventional memory they demanded. it sucked.

so basically i disagree, i'm more productive now than i was back then. and i don't have to keep 3 different floppy sets of OS installation disks for when a random disk goes bad. (yah, remember that?)

[[deXter]]

i built my system years ago and i've always been able to boot from usb/flash drives.

Lucky you, because it doesn't work on my PIII-450. I don't expect it to either, but I do expect it to work on my more recent IBM Centrino ThinkPad - but it doesn't. I've tried with three different brands and types of drives, with different bootloaders and programs and I've given up, atleast on this system. Basically, I know that even if I create a proper bootable USB drive, there's absolutely no guarentee that it'll work on all systems. I'm an admin, and I often use bootable CDs/DVDs for various purposes across many systems. I thought the popularity and the fall in prices of flash drives would see me shifting entirely over to USB drives - but it never happened.

Ask Microsoft to give you a straightforward method to install XP from a bootable USB drive, and you'll get a straightforward answer - it's not possible.

also, it takes me 5 minutes to install an app/game and then run it these days. back in DOS days i'd have to spend an hour making a custom config.sys and autoexec.bat for the stuff i wanted to run depending on if they used EMS or not and how much conventional memory they demanded. it sucked.

I guess I was luckier back then . I know of the dreaded EMS/HIMEM/TSR problems but it was never really a big issue for me - all I needed to do was pick the right floppy disk and boot from it. Eventually I learned enough to modify my config.sys so that I had choices of whether to use a memory manager or not, if so, which one to use, which BLASTER and STACKS settings, and so on. I just had to spend a couple of mins going through the manual of a game to find out the best settings.

These days, games come on multiple CDs or even multiple DVDs (eg: FSX). Did you try installing NFS Carbon or Flight Simulator X? I assure you, it takes much more than than 5 minutes. Even if I have to install an older game like Diablo II (which requires 4 CDs) I'd have to spend a considerable amount of time. But back then, the only installation that was required was extracting from the archive which would take max about a couple of mins.

Ok, so even if you do not consider the installation time, I still require an equal amount of time, if not more, to tweak the resolution, AntiAliasing, Anisotropic filtering, etc with various permutations and combinations to get the game to work at the FPS and graphic detail I'm comfortable at. In the DOS days, you never had to mess with the display settings - you just had to decide between CGA/EGA/VGA and most games automatically chose the best that was available.

so basically i disagree, i'm more productive now than i was back then.

So basically, I still stand by my earlier point. I was more productive back then.

I mean imagine this- if I had to type a document, the time it took for the PC to boot till WordPerfect was ready - less than a minute. Today, while the PC boot time is more or less the same, the OS takes quite a long time to boot. Even with hibernation, it isn't as fast as how it was in the DOS days.

and i don't have to keep 3 different floppy sets of OS installation disks for when a random disk goes bad. (yah, remember that?)

Yes, I do remember that. :/ I used to treat those disks more preciously than gold. I packed them with silica gel in airtight boxes and and made sure it was in a cool, dry, dark place. But I'd still end up corrupting a few - I think they get demagnetized over a period of time. .

But once again, I never had much problems with the OS itself, save a few instances of boot sector virii, which was easily solved by FDISK /MBR and SYS C: . If the rest of the OS files also got corrupted, I'd restore them from my backup archive on the HDD itself. Basically, I never had to do a full format+reinstall.

[celtish]

I still keep a bunch of floppies, but I use it only for demonstration purposes - most of them are bad or dead, but I bring them alive by using SpinRite - I use them to demonstrate the power of SpinRite. You should really watch it in action when it's trying to recover data from a bad sector - you can actually see the contents of your file slowly being recovered, live! And the Flux Reversal Synthesis graph never fails to amaze people!

Didn't know my SpinRite could do that.

As for the floppy debate, I would/will never buy a machine without a floppy bay. Floppies have saved my bacon too many times. Nor, by the way, would I have a system without DOS - that too has been a lifesaver.

[ColdFusion200]

dead as a dodo. may have some uses for legacy systems and old data, but otherwise...

btw, id advise anybody with old pictures and documents on an old floppy to get the files off before the thing succumbs to some magnetic field

[Lost Soul]

i say its nearly dead not much use for them unless your doing a bios flash

[Idontwantspam]

...Also you can drop a floppy on the floor or handle it while eating a Hershey

Bar and not corrupt it, like you would with a CD. ...

Floppies are SO much fragiler than CDs or USB flash drives. True, CD's can't take a certain level of abuse, but floppies were always going bad from magnets or getting bumped in the wrong place or just randomly flopping - hence the name, I suppose. I don't like them. I avoid them.

[cowboyy2087]

@Andromeda43 (message posted May 2 2007, 11:20 AM)

Hit the nail on the head 100 percent i'm a tech myself and i work on alot of PC's with CD drives but some are to old to read CD-R's and CD-RW and somethings just work better coming off a floppy. So the floppy is a good friend to have around.

Edited May 16, 2007 by cowboyy2087

[jcarle]

I use a floppy drive to make images so that I can use them as bootable CDs. I have one installed in my computer now, but for the next one, I'll just use the USB floppy I have laying around somewhere in my big giant slightly-smaller then a 18-wheeler box of cables and miscelaneous computer parts.