Alternatives To The Floppy Disk?

ArcticChicken asks: "I work for a university with about 20,000 students. Despite our efforts to educate people about making backups, and to start considering floppy disks as being semi-disposable, I still get a number of people every week who have their only copy of some critical document on a damaged floppy disk. My question is: what are the real alternatives to floppy disks for low-capacity, high-reliability, RW media? So far I've been looking at a variety of flash memory media. What are these things like for general data storage? Is that use even recommended? Just how reliable are they? How long do they typically last? Are there any leading standards emerging?"

"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."

Comments

I don't trust floppies anymore

[lpontiac]

Is it just me or have they dropped in reliability? I mean, they were never perfect, but 10 years ago I could copy something onto floppy, carry it around for 20 minutes and as long as I avoiding obvious things like speakers it would be fine once I got to the destination. I bought a floppy the other day from the uni bookstore and went through the labs on the way back, formatting it myself and copied a file over. Took it home to my PC on the bus and it was corrupt. Repeat this story a few dozen times over the past year and I just don't trust them anymore.. if I need to use a floppy (fortunately almost everywhere is on the net these days) then I use three, and make redundant copies.

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? :)

Re:I don't trust floppies anymore

[boy case]

Ah the good old days when slashdot was good, USENET was free of spam, you could leave your front door unlocked, and floppy disks worked... *sigh*

:-)

Re:Floppy alternatives in University Setting

[GigsVT]

Yeah, but that Zip disk password is laughable "security".

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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Re:More reliable? Use two?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Here's why: You can't MAKE students do anything. They try to MAKE students use common sense and not eat up bandwith using napster and now they have to block it. Students are HUMAN and they will do what they dang well please! That's why students will just plain not give a damn for your policies like making backup copies of floppies. Also Student machines get 3-4 times the banging that office machines get. Students are always going to lose stuff by corrupt floppies or corrupt disks. The STUDENT just has to learn a little responsibilty and if a teachers student loses the disk or corrupts their only copy and the student can't get it done in time, tough titties....they fail. One F in the GPA will cure sutdent stupidness when it comes to floppy care.

If you do use floppies regularly...

[MoNickels]

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).

Re:Portable mp3 players

[Mike1024]

Hey,

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.