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Huh? I thought both floppy discs and their drives have been out of production for some time now.

Probably not very common, but a little googling got me here pretty fast.

I don't think you can easily find [USB] floppy drives in stock at online computer retailers any more

Again, probably not very common, but not impossible.

Of course, the USB can probably cache more than the floppy can hold, and can definitely move it around a lot faster.

My brain hurts, this is like a laser-guided carrier pigeon. You could transmit more with the laser in less time.

One does wonder what people are using floppies for. There's probably some things without which society would collapse still relying on floppies. And that should scare the heck out of us.

Huh? I thought both floppy discs and their drives have been out of production for some time now.

Probably not very common, but a little googling got me here pretty fast.

I don't think you can easily find [USB] floppy drives in stock at online computer retailers any more

Again, probably not very common, but not impossible.

Of course, the USB can probably cache more than the floppy can hold, and can definitely move it around a lot faster.

My brain hurts, this is like a laser-guided carrier pigeon. You could transmit more with the laser in less time.

One does wonder what people are using floppies for. There's probably some things without which society would collapse still relying on floppies. And that should scare the heck out of us.

Depends on disk density. I know my 1541 would have 664 blocks free per side (the 180k one), but they eventually come out with up to 1MB in the 5 1/4 size.

http://www.floppydisk.com/buy.htm

Wow, these guys still sell 8" floppies!

I don't know about sending you back a USB flash drive but Floppydisk.com offers a service to transfer the contents of floppy disks to CD (see here). Unfortunately the procedure is expensive, prohibitively so in my opinion ($55 USD for the recovery of 10 floppy disks). Luckily there is a more affordable alternative. The FC5025 is a device that adapts a standard 5.25" floppy disk drive mechanism to USB and comes with software for Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. It costs $55.25 USD. Given that you already have a 5.25" mechanism, which aren't easy to find these days, the FC5025 is an affordable solution to your problem.

I don't know about sending you back a USB flash drive but Floppydisk.com offers a service to transfer the contents of floppy disks to CD (see here). Unfortunately the procedure is expensive, prohibitively so in my opinion ($55 USD for the recovery of 10 floppy disks). Luckily there is a more affordable alternative. The FC5025 is a device that adapts a standard 5.25" floppy disk drive mechanism to USB and comes with software for Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. It costs $55.25 USD. Given that you already have a 5.25" mechanism, which aren't easy to find these days, the FC5025 is an affordable solution to your problem.

Anybody still using 5 and a quarter inch disks? I see they are still being sold even though I haven't seen one in a modern PC since 1990..... http://www.floppydisk.com/buy.htm

Floppy History - http://oldcomputers.net/floppydisks.html

BTW, have you seen the prices on DSDD media these days?

About $1 a disk. Which isn't that bad. Not as good as they were back in the day, but probably not too far off after adjusting for inflation.

The best place I've found for floppies is (the oddly obvious) http://www.floppydisk.com/. The disks come well packed and are of high quality. I have not had a single disk fail. Not sure if that's cheaper than your current source, but it might be worth looking into. :-)

Now if I go off my C64, I think I had about 300 floppies with games/applications but I only recall buying/receiving maybe 5 of those legitimately.