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Alternatives To The Floppy Disk?
"I'd like to experiment with something with at least 4 to 8MB capacity. I'd also obviously need a "drive" to allow reading / writing to the media. Ideally it'd be something you could mount inside a computer in a 3.5 inch drive bay. Regardless, as far as interfaces go USB is probably the best option. Cost-wise, the "drives" should be out there for $40 or less. (I've noticed Sandisk offers their USB CompactFlash drives for $29.99.) I'd prefer that the cost of the media be the "heavier" end of the solution.
CD-RWs are not an option for a few reasons, the main one being that CD-RW capable drives are still quite expensive. I'd like to avoid anything that includes as many mechanical components as the antique floppy disk / drive combination. We offer our students space on several file servers, but for many, many reasons the use of floppy disks remains commonplace. We are not a tech-heavy institution: the majority of the students could probably be considered "average" for their age group in terms of computer use. I guess in that sense, part of the reason floppy disks have stuck around is that they offer enough space to save a few documents, and do so in a small, easy-to-use package. However, after all these years, it would be nice to think that someone out there is pushing forward with a standardized, low-capacity, high-reliability alternative."
I can understand the problem with a lot of old disks being reused, and a lot of old drives being around that are maybe past their planned lifetime, but I'm having trouble on machines that are no more than 3 or 4 years old, some new a year ago. Has this being happening to anyone else, or am I just jinxed? :)
Take the old "Faster, Cheaper, Better" and replace it with "Capacity, Reliability, Price." You still only get to choose 2. Lets look at the options:
Floppy: Low capacity, mediocre reliability, amazing price. Probably why they're still around. If you want to move small documents, pictures, binaries, etc. then floppies are a good choice. The down side of course being the point of this article.. The reliability thing.
Sandisks: Variable capacity, high reliability, high price. The drives are small and based on USB, so theres no real worry about where you can and can't be able to read your paper. However, the USB drives are cheap, but the smallest Sandisk is 8 megs for $40 (MSRP). That's $5/meg, which by any standard is horrendous. Of course, it does suit the portability and reliability.. But students probably won't want to spend $40(disk)+$30(drive) just so they can get term papers back and forth.
Network: Virtually unlimited capacity, variable capacity, variable price. I like the idea of everyone having a little network share that they can always access. It's not too hard to implement, even across platforms. Of course, what do you do when the network is down or you want to take it home to a computer that isn't wired? This makes the option largely moot.. Physical media are a guaranteed thing.
Unfortunately, you won't find many more options past these ones. The 'big floppy' drives (LS-120, Zip) are out of the question (drives cost a pretty penny and are hardly a standard).
Your best bet? Beat some sense into the students. Floppies are your friend but they aren't flawless. Make backups, have spare disks on hand, etc etc. You'll convince a lot more people to do it that way then to spend enough money for a couple hundred floppies.
I'm not sure about your college's lab machines, but at both my previous university, as well as the one I attend now, the public lab machines tend to be very "unclean". Heavy use, high traffic, accessable to everyone and then some, drives tend to accumulate dust, dirt and gunk at a high rate. Add on to that the stuff scrapped onto the heads by unclean, old disks used by the person before you and you get an environment ripe for disk corruption.
That said, I believe that disk quality has gone done, if only due to the economics. With bulk disk prices being so incredibly low, quality control is probably just another drain on the slim profit margin.
I do agree that the Zip disk is the closest thing to a floppy sucessor we have thus far, and is probably the best choice, but they are just a prone to failure. Just do a search for "Zip 'click of death'"
It would be great if the technology used in digital cameras would hit mainstream as a portable media, I don't know if you have seen a modern memory card but the thing is tiny! Its about as thick as a credit card, and the size of a quarter, and holds 16/32 megs. Might not seem too impressive to you yung'ins, but in my day..... ;)
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Use a shared network drive. Our campus (BSD server and WinNT clients for the most part) just has a large "X: drive" that links to your /home directory. You save your files to your X: drive just as you would to the hard drive, very simple. Plus you can access your files from my system on the network or your dorm computer. Plus theres the added benefit of being able to ftp into your account and access the files for easy upload/downloading. Its cheap, its fast, and its secure. Using removable media is so...90's!
Gorkman
Sony have a similar product, HiFD. Apparently it's faster than LS120, holds 200Mb and of course, is not compatible.
While the LS120 is slower than a zip, it's main advantage is that it completly replaces the floppy drive. Yes you can boot from it on new motherboards, and linux recognises it just fine (/dev/hd ). Also, with syslinux you can boot small distros, such as LRP and get the same advantage as with a normal floppy: You can write-protect the media, easily.
It's just the thing you need for backing-up your data... if it weren't so expensive (both the drive and its media)
Just on a side note, I've read the new superdisk drives will let you format normal floppies to up to 32Mb, but can't find the reference to this anywhere... any link?
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
A student could wak up to a machine, pop his thumbdrive in the front usb port, copy his data to his thumbdrive, pop it out and be off home. At home, his computer most likely has USB. Just pop in the thumbdrive and repeat.
Only Windows drivers currently, but Mac and Linux are supposed to be soon to follow. Its just flash ram... how hard could it be?
Not being one to trust anyone on anything, a few years ago, I (along with a colleague) decided to embark on a little experiment to see just how easy it was to render a floppy unreadable. We were concerned about everyday risks (and this guy happened to be doing some research that involved small electric motors). So we tried leaving them on top of monitors for a few minutes, leaving them on top of speakers, and moving the magnet end of the motors across the surface of the disk at various angles. There was one small Word file on this disk (on a Mac filesystem), and we used the same disk throughout. Despite repeated trials, especially with the otherwise powerful (in the paperclip sense) motor magnets, we were completely unable to erase the file or damage the filesystem.
I believe at the time our scientific conclusion was that floppies are not based on magnetism, but on "tiny bubbles of ectoplasmic phlogiston." We never tried the condition where the file was the sole copy of some critical document, I don't know if that would have affected the results.
Don't have any removable media on the computers. This will force them to save any documents on the file servers.
Obviously some users are going to complain "how can i take my work home to my home computer?"
Keep the floppy drives (cheap/free - you already have them) just somehow make it impossible to save directly to them, but make it easy to copy from the file server to floppy!
To sum up, force it into their thick skulls to keep multiple copies
Why don't you set up a storage server that's backed up nightly up by your university, and just let your students archive/retrieve their stuff on that storage server via the web?
Seastead this.
If you do use floppies regularly, you should be using them this way:
1) One-time file storage for temporary transfer. They are not permanent storage devices. This bears repeating until somebody silk-screens it on the front of t-shirts.
2) Do not carry the floppy around loose in your back pocket, wallet, purse, knapsack, book bag, pencil box, lunch box or thermos. A floppy disk is not a book mark. A front shirt pocket is perfect, if the disk is wrapped. If you have a plastic sleeve or floppy holder, use it. A Zip disk case will hold at least two floppies. This will increase the likelyhood that the floppy will work as intended and keep lint, sweat and fuzz out of the disk.
3) Do not work off/from the floppy. Copy the file you want over to the hard drive first, work on it there, then copy it back if necessary. This will prevent errors from interfering when saving your document. If you find that you cannot copy the document over, or you find that once the document is copied to the drive, there are problems or errors, you save yourself the grief of finding out later when you lose all the work you just did.
4) Consider using a "safety" folder on the disk which contains an extra copy of your important document. Do not make a duplicate of the folder already on the floppy. Instead, copy the document afresh from your hard drive to the safety folder. This is common practice in the creative world, a legacy from pre-Zip, pre-Jaz days when Syquests and floppies were standard.
5) If you don't have server access, consider mailing a copy of a document to yourself using free web email accounts. Make sure to use at least two services at a time as they are unreliable. This will allow you to avoid faulty or unworking floppy drives as well, which in a busy lab situation can mean the difference between getting right to work or waiting for the "good" machine.
Spread the word! Tell everyone! Post signs! How many times have I tried to explain that floppies are unreliable, tempermental and not to be trusted only to find that people don't believe me? They think I'm making it up. Really.
I used to run the IT department for an advertising agency in which one of the users saved *everything* to floppy because she believed her hard drive was untrustworthy. She had hundreds of disks. (Of course, this is the same woman who printed out all of her email messages and filed them alphabetically).
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
For the Thumb Drive, go here.
For a review of the Sony Memory Stick Reader, go here. Now, all you need to do, is to move the USB Ports to the front of the computers!
\\'ilson
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My mobile is automatically activated by the contact between the toilet seat and my ass...
How about handing out rio mp3 pocket players
I bet most people thought that was a joke. Including the author.
They were wrong.
http://www.dansdata.com/cfide.htm is a review of an interesting product: A Small, cheap adapter to let you use a CompactFlash memory card as a plain IDE drive. Only AU$38. It is doubtless availiable in the US from other suppliers, and a large order would probably be quite cheap.
Qoute: If you were wondering whether CompactFlash cards really could work as plain old IDE devices, this adapter ought to put your doubts to rest. The thing's just, essentially, a pin converter. 40 pin IDE connector on one side, standard pushbutton-eject CompactFlash socket on the other, power connector hanging off on a wire. It doesn't even have an activity light.
If you can put up with the cost of CompactFlash cards (Which can be very high, although I don't have any details to hand), you have here a very nice storage solution; just plug it into an IDE cable and tell Windows it's a removable disk drive and it's installed, and your students can get cards in a range of capacities, from one or two megabytes to 500+. It has no moving parts, so not only is it reliable, but it also provides VERY fast access. Solid state drive, anyone?
A lot of mention have been made in this discussion of zip disks. I would like to take this oppertunity to say: Noooooo! Zip disks suck! They often lock up and won't read, and the capacity is big for just holding documents, but too small to install your programs on.
If you don't mind about accessing files from non-school computers, why not set up your computers to create a mapped drive to \\server\username, where a user's files are? This would be easy to do, and could be like a floppy drive but without the floppy, and with a different drive letter. People wouldn't be able to use zip disks or whatever on thier home computers either, so this would work quite well if people have individual usernames. You'd also be able to see who's saving pr0n to disks on the school's connection.
Other than that, I'm not sure what to suggest. There's lots of potential solutions out there, and wrtten elsewhere in the discussion. I'd take a look at them.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
1) The primary one that I have been using for the past ten years is to store my stuff on the network. In prcatice it is far more reliable than any portable media. The space is limited depending on what the sysadmins policy on quotas for students might be. This can be a problem for people working with large graphics files. At my school this is recognized and the students that need it are given up to 500MB of quota. For the rest of us... even the most prolific CS student or English major is not gonna use much more than 5-10M in their entire time at the uni (often much less) even using MS-Words appetite.
2) When I need to move large amounts of data I have a small device the size of a pack of cigarettes. It is an old laptop drive (1.4G). This works very well for me and I can even "hotswap" it between Linux machines. The cost was kinda high US$80 for both "base" units that fit in a 2.5" drive bay. The disk was "free" because I replaced the one in my laptop with a larger one. But "low" capacity laptop disks can be had for cheap. This solution has been extremely reliable and fast. I have been using it for the past two years with no problems. I only use this solution for large transfers of data that would be too time consuming from my home PC (56K).. to school and back.
By far the best solution would be to invest in more shared disk capacity on the servers at the school. As far as network reliability... it would still be cheaper to invest in a more reliable network. The network shares are shareable across all known platforms, at least from a Linux/BSD server. This would cost next to nothing for the school to implement.
Removeable media of the floppy, zip, etc variety are very unreliable. I would certainly not trust my semesters, let alone my lifes, work to a flimsy bit of plastic that is gonna bang around in a plastic case in my bookbag. Students are forever losing and/or mangling their removeable media... add to that the floppy drives, zip drives, etc all get mangled and broken in the labs eventually.
-DU-...etc...
I'd still go for CD-RWs, personally.
You've already got CD-ROMs in the machine, which can simply be replaced by CD-RWs on the spec sheets of new machines. So, the cost comes down.
Now, looking at retailers in the UK, floppy drives cost £15 each. CD-ROMs are going for £30, CD-RWs for £120 so we have an additional cost per machine of £75 if we replace both floppy and CD-ROM with a CD-RW. Hardly huge. The other sensible suggestion - LS120 - would cost £70 and you'd still need a CD-ROM, so the cost extra for that would be £55. For which you have to use media 5 times smaller and 5-6 times _more_ expensive.
If you stick with RWs, burning the CDs is really easy. If you then add DirectCD (lovely program) it's no different from using any disk. Yes, this requires the users to fit the drives to their own machines - but the same is true with anything other than HDD floppies. And the cost per megabyte is _tiny_ compared with any competitor.
Really, if you're committed to removable drives for the students, CD-RWs are by far the best.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Floppies are also fragile, VERY fragile. Left alone in the best circumstances they'll often bitrot in a few months. In the chaotic rough-n-tumble treatment of a students life they'll often last mere weeks reliably.
Number one killer of floppies by students? Headphones.
Particularly headphones dumped in the same backpack. HELLO - these are MAGNETS!!!! (Yes, /.'ers are rolling they're eyes but you wouldn't believe how many hs/college students have no idea of this & are shocked when told.)
Number two killer? Abused out-of-alignment floppy drives.
Particularly common on school computers these beaten-up drives caked full-o-crud are a disaster. US$5 mechanisms reading cheap warped floppies covered in crap, spending years filtering dust into their mechanisms, only to have a floppy get stuck inside and then pried out with the ungentle aid of some improvised tools & a panicking user. Machine A will write something that Machine B can't read but Machine D has a 50% of reading. It gets worse from there.
Third most common killer? Simple physical abuse of the floppy.
Repeated physical shocks. Detritus sifting in through the shutter while at the bottom of the 'pack. Being left in a sunny place to cook, dumped in a cold car trunk to freeze. Then of course there's the classic "Pepsi Syndrome".
So, what are the alternatives?
Super-High-density floppies have come & gone for several cycles. None have caught on, none likely will. Their limitations are all of the floppies limitations and their limited distribution doesn't make up for their extra capacity. Most folks don't care if you can save 4 or 50 meg on a floppy if you can't use it anywhere else.
Zip drives are all of the worst qualities of a floppy (slow, unreliable, same media but more fragile mechanism.) They're poorly built & at the end of their technology lifecycle anyhow. Many corporations are rueing the days they rolled them out en masse and are now banning their use for any critical material.
Orb drives? Sort of an "ultra-Zip" built by the refugees from SyQuest they've distinguished themselves with a delayed rollout, expensive media, and poor drivers. They're faster then the Zips but suffer all of the same media problems along with even less distribution.
Burnable CD's are less fragile but the burner costs more and in the hands of the unwary can often create "coasters" (don't interfere excessively with their disk access!) There's software available that does packet-writing to the CD and thus it appears to be simply another mounted drive (albeit a slow one) but it can be unstable itself & produces disks that aren't universally readable.
Portable hard drives were one idea for awhile. There was even a "DriveBay" spec that was floated. Unfortunately nobody ever really got behind it and it's died. One can still retrofit PC's with a similar sort of chassis to slot-load drives but they'll only accept certain designs.
SCSI drives are a long-time favorite of the Mac & publishing communities but with Apple's move from SCSI they too have waned. USB drives were popular for a week 'till folks discovered how painfully s-l-o-w they are. Firewire/1394/iLink (all different names for the same high-speed serial bus) have potential but their drives command a hefty newtech surcharge.
IBM makes an incredible line of microdrives ranging from 340 MB to 1 GB. These can be mounted in PCMCIA/Credit Card devices and slipped into laptops (& retrofitted desktops) but they also cost a bucket.
Unfortunately all of these drives share something in common - they're hard drives and to a great extent share their limitations. Abuse them a bit & they'll fail catastrophically. Even the ruggedized ones made for laptops have limitations that are daily exceeded in a student's life.
Solid State. The future of storage. It'll also require you to mortgage your future to buy. If you're gonna require folks shell out US$50-$200 for a chip it should hold enough to make it through the semester. Unfortunately that's not true of solid-state, not at today's prices and with MS Word files bloating to 20 MB each for a sigle major paper.
So, what to do?
Well, as you've seen once you abandon the floppy the choices are all either just-as-fragile, more expensive, and much less universal. Folks are using floppies 'cause they have them at home, in the dorm, at their off-campus jobs, etc. This won't work for exotic tech like the ones listed above. They all require significant costs to retrofit each campus machine plus each student must purchase the media for it and then it's pretty much useless or at least a major pain off campus...
As many, many folks have pointed out: Dump the media almost altogether.
Install a few central servers easily network-accessible and well maintained. Put a few well-maintained floppy drive equipped machines in each cluster of computers but otherwise drop support for them. Give all of the students a card detailing how to access them from both on-campus or from off-campus (home, work, other institutions, etc.) Teach all of the faculty how to accept material electronically. Set up special time-stamping directories with automated receipts so there's no "I emailed my assignment on time but you didn't get it" problems. Make sure the student's directories on the server's really are trivially accessible once they've gone through the password challenge, again both on & off campus. Support Windows networking, AppleShare IP, FTP, simple web-based access & WEBDAV, etc.
Novell Netware is fantastic at supporting large communities of users like this & has great educational pricing. Windows NT is popular for it's ubiquity & commonality with other installed systems on the campus. Linux is of course cheapest & infinitely flexible. Talk to your neighboring institutions to see what they're using & their experiences, attend a few conferences, you'll quickly get a good feel for where the trends are heading and what tools you really want to look into.
Wean folks from the physical-media habit. Yes, this will require a new set of skills on their part and things like passwords, encryption, & network security will now become much more important. On the other hand that all needed to be done anyway & in the long run is probably cheaper the supporting all of those floppy drives and their fried floppies.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea. The compression algorithm is such that any error partway through the compressed file renders the remainder of it completely unrecoverable. PKZIPFIX, which "recovers" a damaged archive, in fact only recovers that portion of the archive before the error.
A far better solution is to use ARJ. The latest versions include a switch, -hk, for making a separate redundancy file. The type of redundancy used is sector-based, making it particularly suited to typical disk problems like bad sectors, cross links, and virus damage. Unlike PKZIP, ARJ can recover files that occur after an error in the archive. Archives that span multiple disks are treated as separate archives, so if it turns out disk 1 of 200 was completely unreadable, at least you can recover the other 199 sections. I don't believe this is possible with PKZIP.
Regards,
I have 3 Zip drives. An external SCSI drive I've had for 4 years, an external Parallel Port drive for 2 years, and an internal ATAPI drive that I've also had for about 2 years. Never had a problem with any of them until about 3 months ago when the internal ATAPI Zip drive started making strange noises and acting erratically. After some searching I found out about the "Click of Death" here .
It is a real phenomenon.
When my system began to exhibit the symptoms I called my vendor's support line since it was still within the warranty period and they dispatched a tech to replace the drive within a couple of days. The tech confirmed for me that Zip drives are a major headache for them. They tend to fail on a regular basis.
Do you work for Iomega? You are spreading untrue claims in your message. The problem is NOT with the early models of the Zip drive. The problem is more likely to occur in NEWER models of the drive. Iomega has serious quality control problems and the problem started happening when they started to cut corners in manufatcturing. While it is true that you can damage a drive by dropping it, that is simply NOT the major cause of the problem although Iomega would have you believe otherwise. Do you think I dropped my internal ATAPI drive?
I urge everyone who has a similar problem to check out the Click of Death site for more information. Busted up disks CAN spread the problem between drives, but this is not really the underlying cause of most of the problems.
There have been class action lawsuits filed against Iomega regarding their Zip drive product. Their senior executives were finally forced to admit they had a serious problem. Sending people to their web site without pointing out the alternative explanation is a disservice.
The only way out of this problem in my experience is to remove all the floppy drives from the computers and let users login to their accounts via NFS/NIS or similar technology. If you try going with something non-standard people will bitch and you'll still have various issues. As long as your school offers a way to connect home computers and laptops to the network so that the files are instantly available you shouldn't have any problems. I've seen so many students loose term papers and other critical documents due to floppy disks and shaving on lab computer hdd's. The school officially didn't support restoring these files so unless one of us geeks felt like bending the rules the students were just out of luck. Depending on what happened it can take hours to restore the files. A major pain. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
A couple of clarifications:
> just plug it into an IDE cable and tell Windows it's a removable disk drive and it's installed
If you want hot swap, you need a card reader. <plug>I review a few recent ones here.</plug>
; The CF-IDE, however, is excellent for no-moving-parts Linux boxes. 8Mb or 16Mb CF cards are pretty cheap, and you end up with a highly satisfactory poor man's solid state drive.
> your students can get cards in a range of capacities, from one or two megabytes to 500+.
The current range of CF card capacities is, to my knowledge, 8Mb (cheap, but not per megabyte) to 196Mb (stupidly expensive, but much cheaper per megabyte than the little cards). The fatter CF Type 2 cards hold more; the IBM MicroDrives are Type 2.
> Zip disks suck! They often lock up and won't read
Sez you :-P. In my experience, Zip disks treated with only a small amount of respect are the most reliable removable read/write devices I've seen. That doesn't make them bulletproof, and they will die in time, but for the money they're superb, if you ask me.
If students don't understand basic backup rules, though, no format will be adequate. They'll kill or lose the media, or they'll thork their own files and not have a copy, et cetera.