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Forget SuperDisks -- Try 32MB On A Floppy
alanjstr writes: "IDG News is reporting that Matsushita (aka Panasonic) has developed a floppy drive that will fit 32 MB onto a regular floppy disk. 'To increase the data capacity of a standard floppy, Matsushita's FD32MB system employs zone bit recording -- a system used to encode data onto hard disks and optical disc systems that more efficiently uses the space to record data.' The new drive also supports SuperDisks for 240 MB storage capacity. A Google Search for 'FD32MB' turned up lots of stuff in Japanese. More details and discussion are available here starting back last November." According to the article which starts that PC Market thread, "The new technology increases the number of sectors per track to between 36-53 sectors, compared with its current number of 18 sectors, and its memory capacity per track can be raised from 9.2KB-18.4KB to 27KB." Imagine what the cooler-than-heck Linux Router Project could do with these!
The next version of Windows should fit on 5000 of these
Would it be possible to use minidiscs for storing data like a floppy? Each one holds 140 meg uncompressed and can be erased and rerecorded many times. They're also physically smaller and more robust that floppy disks. Can you get MD drives for PCs for this purpose? Just a thought.
Where can i meet some of those crazed slut indian women?
I recently bought an USB Zip Drive, as it seems to be still a good idea. USB Zip Drives are getting very cheap (arround $80). The best about the USB Zip is in fact the USB. Many people nowadays have USB on their computer, so i can take my external USB ZIP and some ZIP disks with me to transport some data in a easy way without having to burn (and afterwards toss) a CD. It also can make a good Backup Media for all that data that is greater than 1.44 MB but below 100 MB e.g. financial transaction data etc. he only thing i dislike on my ZIP is the still high price for ZIP disks.
Does anyone know what happened to the MiniDisc Data Recorders? As far as i remember some years ago they were really available, but unfortunately Sony was a little too early as it seems and they disappeared.
I would bet that a relaunch of these devices would be a bestselling hardware. You know, MiniDisc could hold arround 120 MB of Data (afaik) and the Price of a MiniDisc is only $1.50. And it is very small too.
Dumb all that floppy disks, the overprized ZIP disks, the not much better LS120 and similar stuff.
MiniDisc could be a way to go. It seems MiniDisc Medias will be arround for a long time, and they are very cheap due to their usage for music.
So Sony are you listening?
CDs have a big drawback. They don't fit in a pocket.
The smaller size do. You can get 75 mm (~3") CD-Rs that store 156 MB instead of 650+. Sony uses them to store pictures with the CD writer built into the MVC-CD1000. Unfortunately, even with the small discs it's still a rather large camera. Also, you won't find any "100 CD-Rs for $10 after rebate" deals on the small CD-Rs.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Also, they scratch easily, and drives can be finicky about working with them. I can take a CD-R I burned in my Yamaha CD burner and my generic 32x IDE cdrom can't read it at all. Pop it into my ancient 4x Sony SCSI cdrom drive and it's fine. Pop it into my car CD player and just spins and spits it out. CD's are just a pain in the ass. Floppies worked. Period. You put it in, your computer recognized it as long as it was formatted and not shattered into a million pieces, and all was right with the world.
Ooh, sorry, if you store things in the Midwest you still have to watch out for tornadoes and the occassional Tsathoqqua.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
That's too bad, because Iomega were replacing the drive and damaged media for free (in the UK at least).
I have a Zip-100 at work and a Zip-250 at home (seemed like a good idea at the time), and until I got a 15Gb removable HD, it was great as a super-floppy storage method. It also seems to be one of the only 'super-floppy' formats that is about as popular on Macs as it is on PCs.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
On all SCSI machines, the Floptical was a practical way of adding floppy support too - SGI Indy's have a slot in the side for a floptical drive, whose main purpose was really to be a 1.44M floppy disk (it was optional unfortunately, so I don't have one :( )
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
What do you mean, all 83 tracks? Plenty of floppy drives will refuse to step their heads beyond the standard 80 tracks (or rather, cylinders).
I can tell you right now what the router project could do with these: crash, pitifully.
Sheesh, floppies are unreliable enough with whopping big magnetic blobs and 1.44 megs per disk. I doubt you'd get one bit in ten back from any more tightly crammed in scheme.
That's Bipedal Transfer Mode for all you network engineering types.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
An alternative to superdisks? Finally! An alternative to that 120MB, decently fast yet archaic technology! This is going to blow that away!
Seriously, slashdot... what were you smoking? Why do we need to imagine what LRP can do with a 32 MB floppy, when it can already do all that and more with an LS-120 drive?
Once again, excellent work.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
How is one small recycled paper box wasting more resources then the infinite amount of plastic manufactured on CD jewel cases, that break and then are discarded? Uh, floppies are *made* of plastic. Don't forget that the spinning media is just a part of the packaging. I don't buy jewel cases anymore for CDs, in case you were wondering. I buy CDRs in spindles of 100, and stuff burned CDs into those nifty sleeve books (like the ones Case Logic and others make). Not wasting nearly as much stuff :)
Read my stuff.
yeah but the same thing exists with modems.. They are always trying to push the limits of the analog standard... It would just be better if it wasn't a whole new drive :)
I haven't used a floppy in the longest time. It is either CDROM or Zip. I just keep losing floppies hehe.
howabout 6gigs on a dvdR
#=-weo-=#
I disagree completely.
I have personally used somewhere around 90 PCs personally, and I have seen with my own eyes somewhere around 400 more in use. Out of this probably near to 500 PCs, I have seen one (ONE) zip drive that wasn't on the shelf of PC-World.
That's not ubiquitous, that's not even common.
Every single one of those PCs has had a floppy drive. Actually, I exagerate (and I can't spell that word). Probably 10 or so didn't have a floppy drive. Although 30 or so did have 5 1/4 inch floppy drives either instead of a 3.5 inch or in addition to.
Note that I'm not including cash registers or other non-generic usages.
~Cederic
Even if this works, would you not still be bound by the transpher rate of the floppy bus? Is that not the most pathetic thing in the world? semaphore can move bits faster than that...
CD-Rs in a Big Fucking Safe (tm) that's bonded to the concrete floor with huge bolts. That should be okay. Do it twice to give redundancy :>
--
Delphis
According to the article, this new drive is a USB drive. Transfer speed is significantly better than the old sluggish floppy bus.
I would fully agree that bootable USB devices would be fantastic, though!
The floppy disk manufacture have spent years 'improving' their disks. This is, of course, to be read as "Squeezing every last cent out of the manufacturing costs." What we end up with is disks that (most of the time) format fine when first used, but just a few weeks down the track are unusable, and have to be thrown out.
:)
However, they've not done the same thing with the old 720k disks. These fortunately have the same oserted rating as the 1.44M disks. So, if you can find them, buy all you can, drill a hole on the opposite side of the write enable hole and viola! You have a 1.44M disk that is generally more reliable than the designed-for-the-purpose 1.44M disks
Hahaha, the heading of the paragraph following it is quite amusing too :)
:)
Here's a direct rip off the page:
The 32MB they record the former 2HD (1. 44MB) making use of the disk
Large increasing capacity technology " FD32MB " of floppy disk development
< Main point effect >
Matsushita å electronic industrial corporation (president: æ± oral happiness 彦, head office: Kagawa prefecture Takamatsu city), the 2HD (1. 44MB) the 32MB (at the time of the format) to the floppy disk large increasing capacity technology " FD32MB " which can be recorded was developed with floppy disk making use of next term 240MB super disk drive.
< Effective fruit >
Use use expands the floppy disk which is the cheap record media by using the next term 240MB super disk drive which loads this technology, (the or less FD, the 2HD) as a large capacity record media of the 32MB. And so on as a secondary record medium of semiconductor memory of the 32MB which is used with the one for digital camera * semiconductor audio player and the like, it can assure the reuse of the FD.
< The inside permitting/inserting >
This technology, (1) improvement of the track/truck density with overwrite, (2) the ZBR (the Zone Bit Recording), improvement of the track recording density with the PRML, (3) improvement of reliability of the data due to the error correction technology due to the C 1 ECC which is not the FDD, (4) prevention of error elimination with the former FDD, consists of four new development technologies.
< Special length >
Former FD (2HD and 1. 44MB) record capacity approximately 22 time improvement (32MB).
< Until recently example >
The largest merit of the FD, being cheap, easily is thing, but in those to which record capacity is small, needs big record capacity such as picture * animated picture of these days it was not practical. In addition, there is a tendency where as for the used FD, reuse does not advance with the appearance of the large capacity record media, in and the like the desk makes desertion.
< Utilization >
For OEM drive for PC built-in from November of 2000 sample shipment schedule.
< Special permission >
Domestic 3 cases (while applying)
Gotta love machine translations
To heck with that. The multimedia card is the size of a postage stamp and 32mb is available for $60. My MP3 player takes two, and when larger sizes become available I can upgrade immediately. I've successfully used it floppy like for files from Mac OS & Win2k (none of my linux boxes have a USB port to try this from)
Anyone have any ideas on what this drive will (does) cost? For a floppy drive to succeed, it needs to be dirt cheap. When you throw together a 9000 MHz Celeron system, how much do you pay for a floppy drive for it (assuming you don't have any on the shelf?)...it's usually like $20 or $25.
:)
The Iomega Zip drive is nice because it offers quite a bit of space for a small price. But then it has the usefulness factor. You can't easily boot from a Zip drive in all machines, unless it's SCSI. They don't manufacture those anymore, and even if they did, you'd need a SCSI controller, which would up your price again since that's not a standard PeeCee component.
In addition to the drive being cheap, the media will have to be affordable. Look at the Jaz drive. It's like $300 or $350 for the drive, and $120 for EACH cartridge. Come on. A hard drive with 5 times the capacity is cheaper than that.
Anyone remember the "Floptical" drive? I had one of these until it finally keeled over. When they were new, they cost $400 and required a SCSI controller. Reads and writes and boots from regular 1.44MB floppies, as well as 21MB floptical disks. Nice drive, but way too expensive.
...Looking back over my post here, I realize I don't really have much of a point, just a question.
-David
A superdisk costs ~$8. 3 floppies cost ~$1. See a difference?
Shane
They say on the site that these are fairly unreliable and that data corruption is somewhat commonplace. Don't know how bad, like tape backup, or worse? Oink,
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
At least that's a plus. ;)
Oink,
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
Sandisk makes a floppy disk-sized cartridge that holds a SmartMedia card and allows you to access it using a standard floppy drive (Mac is read-only though). It does require drivers though, so no booting from it a-la LRP.
While SmartMedia is certainly more expensive than floppies (still ~$2/mb), it's certainly a lot more durable and portable and (as a standard) will probably outlast this new floppy tech.
If I remember the way it worked, LS-120 would appear to be a descendant of the Floptical (magnetic storage on one side and optical positioning on the other side of something resembling a 3.5" floppy disk). They had at least a limited amount of popularity among the Apple II crowd at the time (in part because the drives also read ordinary MFM floppies, so you could exchange data with x86 boxen through them). I don't recall offhand which companies were behind the Floptical, but it might be the same as for LS-120.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It'd be a shame to see millions of floppies in a dump... or congregated anywhere, for that matter :-)
Floppies have one crucial advantage that hasn't been discussed yet -- hardware write protect. It's the only way to fly for appliance computing.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Actually, this only works if you fool the density detect mechanism of the drive by drilling an extra hole. And also only if the surface quality of the disk happens to be good enough for HD, which may, or may not work out depending on the quality of your brand of double density disks...: don't try this with 3M disks!
> You can even format 1.44MB disks to 1.7 MB in a normal 1.44MB floppy drive
Actually, this is still the same basic format. Bit density is exactly the same, the only thing is that sectors are packed closer together. Actually, you can even push your disk to 1992K if you use bigger sectors (=less sector header overhead), and use all 83 tracks (rather than the 80, that are used by default).
2.88MB is a different format altogether, using a bit density which is twice as high. The new 32MBformat will be even more different, and probably not use MFM (the low level bit encoding of floppy disks) at all. It doesn't even connect to the floppy bus, but to USB!
Ermm, this device connects via USB, not via the floppy bus. So forget booting (unless your BIOS can boot from USB?), and floppies' traditional slowness: this will use USB's speed (still slow compared to a hard disk, but much faster than traditional floppies).
This devices connects using USB, which should also address the slow transfer rates problem. Actually, as it uses zone bit recording, rather than the traditional MFM, there's no way it could be connected "the usual way". Indeed, in the traditional PC floppy architecture, the encoding is handled by the floppy disk controller (on the motherboard), rather than the drive.
If the device does indeed connect to the floppy bus, it is indeed limited to its slow datarate (1Mbps max, corresponding to 2.88 floppies). This is for example the case for floppy tape drives, as well as for those adapater floppies reading smartcards.
Other devices, such as the LS-120 connect to the IDE bus (AFAIK), and are not limited by the slow floppy speeds.
The first drive out the gate is USB. Perchance improvements to the mechanism have been made...
Regarding consumer level MO drives:
Take a look at Fujitsu's 1.3GB DynaMO drives.
http://www.fcpa.com/product/mo/mo_model.html
Currently they run about $300-400, with 5 packs of 3.5" 1.3GB disks for ~$100. While more expensive than Syquest/ORB drives, this puts them in the same price range as Jazz drives, but with very affordable (and FAR more reliable) media.
I used to use a Jazz drive for backups/removable storage, but the $100-150 price for disks was just too painful. While I value my data, I can't afford Jazz disks in the amount I need; MO disks prove to far more reliable and much cheaper.
Supposedly MO drives are more common in Japan and Europe (can someone else comment on this?) I'm hoping this will ensure that someone keeps making them, so I can get them in the US. Also be aware that the 3.5" 1.3GB format is Fujitsu/Sony proprietary, but the drives read other types up to 640MB as well.
FWIW, I bought mine from buy.com.
-Atif
1. They only work in MultiRead drives... sometimes.
2. You can read, you can write, but you can't delete. You can only "hide" files and wipe out the whole disk at once.
3. They have a poor shelf life, not proven to be any better than floppy diskettes yet.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I would not be able to exercise my natural rights of freedom of religion or speech, hence it's not an option.
Communism is like Nazism, only the scholars and free thinkers are the persecuted instead of the Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Because responding to a troll is as bad as being one.
(Yes, I know I'm indirectly responding to a troll, so no need to point that out.)
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
In my opinion, I do not see how a new floppy drive technology can survive. Who needs 32mb on a floppy anyways? All you use floppies for are for boot disks. Most people store their other stuff on their 650mb cd-rw's. I feel sorry for the company who wasted time and money in researching floppy technology.
i agree. on my campus 1/4 of the zip drives were bad, and disks routinely failed. they are incredibly unreliable.
Backup: must be reliable, otherwise you might as well not make a backup. What is the point in backing up to a media that is even less reliable as harddisk. It is beyond me why people ever made backups to floppy or zip etc. The only sensible backup are CD-R or (good) tapestreamers.
With todays >40GB HDD's, CD-R doesn't make much sense for backup (let alone ZIP disks), you need at least tapes that store >10GB.
I have to agree with the other posters on this. For a little bit I was thinking, "cool", but then reality set in. As other people have stated, one immediate question is reliablity. But another really important concern is speed. Has everyone forgotten how horribly, horribly slow these things are? It takes *forever* to copy a meg to/from (especially to) one of these things. They would have to improve the transfer rate by many, *many* orders of magnitude to prevent people from having to wait hours to get all 32MB copied to/from their little floppy. Also, about the reliablity thing again: doesn't it seem like if you put *more* onto the disk surface, you're going to get something that's *less* reliable? So there's something else they'd have to work against...
Your floppy is dead; and no one cares.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Where's the spec API or whatever you need to make them drivers.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
See topic
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
What is the point on the FD32? Superdisks already have 120 MB capacity. Why not just use that for your linux routers? Superdisk also supports the normal 1.44 MB disks.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find the 'president of oral happiness' extremely amusing... I am fairly certain I am glad we don't have a position like that at my company... heh.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
Do you really put floppies in your pocket?
I don't think I've ever done that and I've handled a lot of 3.5" floppies (don't take that the wrong way)
Those little doors can slide open and I wouldn't want to get some pocket lint on the exposed media.
They are unreliable enough without being handled carelessly.
Cheap replacement costs for media
Ubiquitous access to the media
As few pieces as possible
These points do not conflict with this product. Your point one is also applies to this product. Your point 2 is subjective (for 20x the storage, drive will cost 6-8x more (I do not buy the $4-7 floppy drives; and people wonder why they are unreliable)). A agree with your point 3, but that just makes it easier to have compressed utilities on the disk and uncompress them onto the ramdisk, so reading/executing them doesn't require an extra decompression time. And anyway, right now you can get a 64mb dimm for 10-15 more than a 32mb dimm. Sounds like almost free memory.
The problem with HD's is they are too big. You just can't get a small to medium sized HD that is fast (relatively) and reliable (warranty VS 3 day return at computer show)
Also, disk-on-chip is much more expensive than this will be. A 32mb d-o-c costs about $120-130. This drive will be $40-$50 less, and the capacity is unlimited (because they are removable). As far as floppy disk reliability: I'm not saying I would trust any 'ol floppy, but if you were going this route, you could find the best floppy on the market.
I am not sure I follow you on the ejectable jumper on the CD. If it is mounted, you usually can't eject it w/o unmounting. If it is being used, you would need to be very rude (and therefore very privileged).. And when it reboots, (at least all of my machines) the cd is retracted when the bios resets. If you have any persistent writable media as well as the cd-rom, then you just make sure the bios will never be able to boot off that (of course the best thing is to not have it there in the first place).
The guy had 1.44 floppies formatting to 14MB and 2.88s formatting to 36. Apparently (according to the inventor, who is biased) it was also supposed to be more reliable, though I don't know how.
It seemed pretty fast, though, when I saw it copying files.
and this one was based on a hard disk principle. I'm guessing he just managed to sell off the patent.
Mind you, if you got good disks (they exist, you just have to avoid the highmarks) this might be okay for those just-too-big files.
(instead of those CD-Rs? Okay, maybe not. However, it's quicker to write to a floppy.)
Perhaps you have a bad *floppy drive*? Same thing happend to me.. then I noticed my brother, who bought the same diskettes I did in the same store, never had a problem with them... So I changed by Teac floppy for a Matsushita (panasonic) one and bam! problem gone... never had a floppy problem since.
Andre060
MO Drives have interested me ever since I saw Eraser but I sure have not seen them take off. What type of MO solutions are there? I mean I can get 4 80min HQ cdrws for $10 at the most - thats the same 2.6 at less cost and more compatability. I dunno - those cool lil things in Eraser were just bad ass
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I like to play with computers, and don't always have the money for machines that can boot from a cdrom. Last weekend I installed Slackware on a 486. I made boot/root floppies to do so.
Also, I use floppies to move small files between computers (network isn't up yet).
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
Great. 10 minutes to read the boot image.
Depends on the drive. I regulary pushed the one in my Atari ST (this is 1980s!) from to 85 tracks 11 sectors. SD, still got ~900kb from most disks.
it's in my head
WTF? And throw away all those good coasters? Come on, geek, and think *globally*. There are better ways to deal with AOL disks. The coaster, for one, but how about the more interesting ways? I, for one, like to make them in to mobiles. There is also, for the trigonometry students, a way to make them into representational graphs of f^1(x)=sin(theta). Can you *feel* the geekiness here, folks? It's a new trend. Or something.
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
I have used a computer every single day of my life for the past 5 years (?) Work, home, school. I graduated college in 1999. I haven't needed to use a zip drive once in all those years. I've used the floppy drive countless times. At my current job we have over 500 computers running at this location, and not one of them has a zip drive. Sorry, but the Zip is not ubiquitous.
--------
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Oh, wow, floppy disks may become useful again!
Now, all we need is for AOL to switch back to sending out floppies instead of CDs, and we've got an infinite amount of usable storage again.
I knew that drawer full of floppies would come in handy eventually.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Why should I 'forget SuperDisks?' No matter how many mb you cram on a floppy, they're still obsolete. LS120 uses IDE bus and holds 120mb, which means it's faster, holds more data, and is 'non-legacy.' Floppies should have been discarded years ago....
Actually, I've run LRP before and am trying to get it up now. My first big obstacle was that the newest version (2.9.8) was too large for me to be able to use the other packages (bind823, sshd, pppd) that I wanted. And, the multi294.lrp package available caused the boot to fail (multi294 adds the cabability to boot LRP from 2 floppies for root v 2.9.4 only). So, I've had to use 2.9.4. With this, I could easily fit all my packages on the disk with room to spare. Maybe even store logs in the extra 20 or so MB. As long as this would work properly (I haven't yet read the article, sorry, bad habit) with the old drives I have in my machine and it would simply be a software hack, this would be a great thing for LRP. The only slowness would come when booting. But even now, booting isn't that slow. It's pretty comparable to what you'd get from a 486-66 running a full distro with enough for a router and firewall. Maybe a little longer.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Excuse me: BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Do you also believe in these emails that tell you how to make $50000 with only a $5 investment?
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Yes, we've all heard about the amazing 32MB 3.5" floppy drive. Unfortunately that doesn't satisfy the larger portion of technological hold-outs. What about developing a 50MB 5.25" floppy drive, a 20MB 8" floppy drive, and a 10MB standard punch card machine?
I use floppies all the time at work. Scores of boot disks, and DOS utilities. Even a linux bootdisk to thwart silly users when they change NT passwd's. I have plenty of usage for floppy disks. "Why not put those on CD?" Well I guess we could but it seems to me to be a total waste of time to burn a CD everytime I need a utility. I have a nice floppy imaging program with all my disk images so in case someone needs a copy of a diskette or if one of mine conk out, it's there in a minute. I really haven't had many diskettes go dead on me. Of course I do take care of mine. They sure do take more abuse than a CD, though, except for maybe being near a magnet (but who's that silly?). Put a nice scratch on a CD, and wooo.. bye-bye data.
ah! I had no idea the handling was done on the motherboard side. In those applications where some device pretends to be a floppy, are the devices limited then to the slow data rate we see with floppies? Or can they transfer at a faster rate (even if it's not in the same league as USB1, say)?
Most will agree that the floppy ought to be dead. Slow transfer rates, fragile medium, low capacity. This latest invention seems to address the last, only.
Yet there is a 3.5" format medium that stores 1.3GB, is about as fast as a Hard disk from 1995, and survives casual drops and stray magnetic fields. It's magneto-optical.
The only downside to MO, is its price. The latest and greatest 3.5" format drives will cost around US$400. But it really deserves to be the small, portable data storage medium of choice. That no one has even mentioned it yet (while bringing up DVD-R, CD-R, etc.) demonstrates how little marketting the devices have had outside of Japan. Perhaps if PC manufacturers would start offering it as an option (like Zip was for a while), it would take off, prices would come down, and it could gain the ubiqiuity that will be necessary for a floppy replacement.
They're also shiny and will enhance your nest.
...but if they could do the same thing for the 5 1/4 inch floppies, I'd be able to fit my entire Commodore 64 collection on a single disk!
Anyway, the Jungle is an appropriate comparison, because like your analysis of floppies, they are both misunderstood. Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle as a pro-Communism piece, but the only message that people got was that the slaughterhouses were filthy and needed to be cleaned up. Likewise, you argue that we need to be developing Yet Another Storage Medium without thinking that millions of floppies that might otherwise be headed to a landfill might find a useful purpose once again.
New technology that promotes recycling and a positive effect on ecology. Upton Sinclair would have liked it that way (or at least, the people who read his books would...)
I'll just stick in my two cents and agree with you - Imation disks are the absolute worst you could buy. I remember quite a few people in classes I had that were using Imation disks that were losing programming projects because of their cheap quality. About one of the last places you want the stupid things is where they're sold most often.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Perhaps not, but I don't think cameras do this anyway. They assuredly have some sort of memory buffer to handle this.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
The problem with zip disks is that they are too fast. With a floppy at least only the most moronic work directly off the floppy (they are only nearly uncountable).
Now, the biggest problem with your solution (that is, emailing your big files to yourself) is that this is another STUPID way to be transferring files. There are always better ways to transfer files than email. It should be the method of last resort. Let's see, http, scp, ftp ... that's enough for now. Or use one of the free netdrive services.
Nothing is more annoying for a sysadmin than to slogin to the server in the morning and discover that some pinhead has filled up their mail box with 600MB of files (which translates into about 685MB after MIME translation, BTW). Believe me.
Then again, LARTing said pinhead can be quite satisfying.
:wq
As far as I'm concerned, portable media is only good for installing fresh to a new computer and digital cameras.
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Since this new technology can record much more data on the same old disks that we already have...
With the high unreliability of the floppies we have, this just means that we will lose more data every time.
I will stay with CD-RW as my rewritable, removable media for now.
The Pentium 4, Revealed!
A lot of people are talking about reliability ... I am wondering if it would be possible to develop a newer type of floppy disk that is semantically the same as the old ones, but is maybe coated or toughened up somehow for better reliability.
isn't it time we allow floppy drives to die? it deserve a place next to the 5.25" drives...
it's time these unreliable and vulnerable little things get replaced by something more digital...
it's stupid how long these things have been around...
the only cool use I see is Linux Floppy Routers and wallpaper
Ricardo.
One problem with this solution is that it is USB based, and almost all PC BIOS's do not support booting from a USB floppy. Some laptops, such as the Sony SR7K do, but I have not seen any desktop PC's supporting USB boot. If you want something bootable, how about BIOS extensions to boot from a compactflash card in a SanDisk usb reader.. That would make an excellent Linux Router.. solid state boot media offers the kind of reliability you want in a network device. Combine that with a tiny ATX motherboard, a few ethernet ports, and a small enclosure & you would have a kick-ass router.
Most modern BIOS's support USB floppy drives. They also support booting from floppy drives. Catch my drift here? Support for booting from a USB ZIP drive is also supported by alot of the newer MOBO's.
Point is, compatibility is not a problem for 85% of the people out there, it's just the 15% who are screwed. I still use floppies because I KNOW they will work no matter what, crap, I can insert a floppy in any computer and read it, and what's more, I'll be able to write to it! You can't do that with CD-ROM's, only computers with CD-R or CD-RW's can do that. This is why CD-R's are not used in collages to transfer documents back and forth, they aren't exactly usefull for that (nor where they designed for many small rapid writes, they where designed for a small number of large write operations.)
Floppies are also fun, they are the (almost) square frisbee!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
CD-R's are notoriusly unreliable. I've heard of cheap CD-R's having a 20% failure rate, successful burn, succesful read, 2 or 3 months later, dead CD-R. (or CD-RW, case depending)
;] just so I could put in another few HD's, unfortunately the cost of the new computer has left me without money for a HD, and I'm taking in around 10gigs a week of data, I have files that are 2 gigs in size, CD-R's are not the solution to backups!)
That is why I don't trust my data to those CD-R's that are free after rebate, those are NOT designed for archiving people! Either use expensive CD-R's, or just buy a few more HD's (I recently upgraded to a Full Tower, large one at that
Damn, I wish ORB Drives would come down in price, and up in data density. Mabye they could use this new technique to up their storage capacity to something around 10 gigs or so, that would be really damn nice. As it stands, they are not price efficent (300$ for 30gigs, ick, 80gig HD's are cheaper then that:)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The internet is useless for the transfer of small amounts of data anyways, unless both people have some neato privet P2P setup that allows direct connections to an IP address without any other B.S. going on. If ya use e-mail, you can often times get complaints about size (one server supports 2MB attachments, another supports 10MB attachments, another supports 300KB attachements, ACK, evil evil EVIL, no way to send a 100meg video file like that:) Or even a decent sized Document with a few graphs and such in there)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Now companies can charge more than 5 dollars a piece for "enhanced floppies."
Ha! I kill me!
As long as they're messing around with this (pretty useless) stuff, why dont they make me an MFM controller that will allow me to store 400mb on an old seagate st-225? Also, why would i buy a -new- diskdrive when i could buy a cdr for (probably) a bit more and be able to exchange my discs with just about anyone? And wasnt one of the points of the linux router project to make use of older/obsolete hardware useful again? How does buying a new diskdrive fit into this? And i'm not even talking about driver support for these things. FreeSco (another router-on-a-floppy) is based on kernel 2.0.38...
"Nasdaq crashed this week. Maybe it was running on Windows 2000." --Dennis Miller Live 4/7/2000
/.'s 10 Millionth
Besides LRP and Freesco, how about digital cameras? Let's see - Panasonic manufactures the only digital camera that can store hundreds of thousands of images on a single floppy. Sounds pretty cool to me! Of course, you have to have a compatible drive in your computer to read the disk, so Panasonic makes sales in both areas.
/* Linus is The One
CDs have a big drawback. They don't fit in a pocket.
I do. It's the transport media in SneakerNet.
This would be great if they could integrate it with cameras, PDAs, etc. Right now, the main option is flash-ROM and memory sticks which cost a fortune. 32MB cost about $80, compared to a floppy price about 1/200 of that!
The only thing that I would like to know is how fast is it?
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Buy a bigger jacket.
KaZaAm! Problem solved.
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Let me give you the lowdown
30 meg .avi's here we come!!!
Sarcasm is the recourse of a weak mind...
--
and if you go to college these days, you seriously can't get by without a ZIP drive
I don't see why not. I'm in college, and I haven't given Zip disks a second thought. Any large files I need transfered (and I very rarely do) I can just email to myself. If I need to free up harddrive space, I have a much more "standard" and usefull CD-Recorder. No one else I know has a zip drive, really. No need for them.
Stupid like a fox!
Now, the biggest problem with your solution (that is, emailing your big files to yourself) is that this is another STUPID way to be transferring files. There are always better ways to transfer files than email. It should be the method of last resort. Let's see, http, scp, ftp ... that's enough for now. Or use one of the free netdrive services.
Doesn't seem so stupid to me. It works great. The email server is on the campus ethernet so files get transferred to it it no time, and I can grab it from and computer that runs a broawer (web mail client). After I've transferred the file, I just delete the email. Works great. And if the server is handling the mail for the entire campus (which it is) a couple of 50-60 meggers isn't gonna kill it. Sure, I can (and sometimes do) run an FTP server off of my computer, or something like that, but not all other computers on campus can easily access it. Email works rather well.
Stupid like a fox!
This is just what we need. *another* media. Sound exciting
But does it run the latest kernel?
Stupid like a fox!
'nuf said =)
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
I'll stick with 32mb flash for my LRP. :)
system employs zone bit recording -- a system used to encode data onto hard disks and optical disc systems that more efficiently uses the space to record data.'
No shit! Obviously Zone Recording is more efficient! But what IS it. I hate when marketing tries to explain concepts.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Hiya - I've just got a minidisc player and it has made me think why there isn't an MD-ROM/R/RW standard for computers out. They hold the same amount of info as a CD, but they are about a quater of the size and they have protective casing. Just a thought
> I tend to get 1 or 2 bad diskettes from every box of 10 I buy.
How could you possibly buy enough _boxes_ of floppies to come to this statistically significant conclusion? Or are you just making it up? ;-)
The problem I see, though, is that democracy appears to fail in extremely large installations too. Well, the representative democracy we see in the US. Perhaps we should explore the possibility of a large implementation of true democracy (eg polling the entire population on issues instead of allowing elected [and likely paid-off and corrupt] representatives to decide for us). Have we had the technology to do this before the past few years? Hell, do we have the technology now, can we keep a system like that secure enough?
I'm tired, I'm sure that's obvious in this post. Time for bed.
funny munging
Wouldn't that require replacing the removable media interface in your Mavica with this company's drive heads? Probably a BIOS update to, so it knows it can write more than 1.44 mb. Sigh.
funny munging
duffbeer is pointing out a troll, any you mod him down for trolling? You should be ashamed, he was helping you see this cleverly disguised troll. When someone gets this excited about floppy disk Technoledgy, warning bells should be going off.
since cdroms are cheaper, faster and more reliable.
It sounds great. But aside from being a commercial dead end like the LS-120 and the Sony HiFD, the quality of floppy disks today is abhorrent. It seems like they go bad after just a dozen or two uses. It's awful. I used to have floppies for YEARS, and now I have tobuy a new box every couple weeks. (Why? You try booting off of a CD on a system that doesn't support it. Floppies are still useful for non-CD-R equipped machines when the net work is down (especially if that's why YOU'RE there.))
--
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Actually, you can. Just like you can format 720k floppies to 1.44 (I used to all the time) and smaller capacity 5.25" to a higher capacity. You can even format 1.44MB disks to 1.7 MB in a normal 1.44MB floppy drive, remember Microsoft's DMF format?
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jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
This used to take me 4 floppies.
Bit late.
Check out PicoBSD. It has been done.
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
I sure hope these new drives aren't reliable or anything. That would sure spoil everything.
www.bakemypotatoes.gov
this just improves the reliability. I normally carry arround two disks of the same think if I am forced to use floppies (no ftp access at school) but spanning a file over 10 - 20 disks just makes it impossible to carry 2 coppies. by packing more on it just helps people like me have more assurance
:(
(except you prolly need new drives
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
I've made the same observation - once, in the early 90's, I actually let a diskette go through the washing machine in my jean's pocket and it STILL worked perfectly as soon as I had let it dry out completely. I still have that one and it still works well, unlike virtually all of the diskettes I have purchased in the last couple years. Nowadays, I reformat all my floppies before saving anything important to them just to scan for bad sectors. If any are detected, then I just toss the disk since I know it will go soon and take my data with it. That is MY definition of a bad disk - one that is even slightly damaged.
Well, where did you go to school? I graduated from San Diego State in 1999 and I can't remember with any confidence if even _one_ of the machines in the public computer laboratories had a Zip drive.
At the job I had in San Diego at the time, out of maybe forty or fifty PC's, there was one Zip drive. There was also one Jaz drive.
hyacinthus.
Does anyone *really* use floppies any more?
end communication
This make things much more efficient.
The problem with new solutions over floppy drives is the price. A floppy drive adds $10 to the price of your system ; disks are 15c each. ZIP can't match this in hardware or media cost. Solid state USB storage is hellishly expensive by comparison. CDR(W) media is cheap, but the drives are more expensive than a HDD and removable case/bay.
Any new removable media needs to meet a few criteria to become accepted:
I don't believe there is room for another floppy standard. CDR(W)s are common enough for large data, but a cheap, accessible medium is required for smaller transfers. USB memory seems promising, but needs to become a lot cheaper before it can be viable.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
And I thought we got rid of bad sectors when the cdr came. Guess not! Floppys is the single storage media I hate the most. I have about 50 floppys on my desk, each and every one of them has 90% of bad sectors.
Their disks are very durable.
At least according to some moderators around here.
(looks at subject line)I don't care too much about reliability, but speed would be an aweful concern for me.. if a disk goes back, just throw it out, but making a new one would be a pain at like 1meg/5mins... Just sitting there letting it crank along.. ugh.. It would be cool if somehow they could make it so 32 megs would go as fast as 1.44 megs to copy then I think this would have some promise.. and for 38 bucks (For drive) I'd buy one for linux... But I'm always asking for too much...
come on now, woohoo 32megs, thats what NS6, most 1.44 meg floppies cant even hold 1.44 megs for more then a few years. Id hate to see how well they do with 32megs. I used to have a zip drive and found 100megs just not enofe for a good backup. and with the cost of cdrw drives, seen them under 100$ now and cdrw disks for under 1$ and you can boot off them too if you wish. the only downside being you cant just copy to them like a floppy *yet* without useing some propritary software/filesystem.
It is pritty cool that it can be done, but as far as usefullness, no 32megs isnt enofe to warent the cost of the drive. I only keep a floppy drive in my system to boot into beos to reinstall the bootmanager whenever I have to reinstall win9x
Also, *most* publishing service bureaus support material brought in on Zip disks.
A while back I read a survey (I'll see if I can find the source) taken of service bureaus in the Bay area (IIRC), and a large chunk of their work came in on Zip disks.
Seriously, though, when I bought my new computer this past summer (Thinkpad i 1200) it didn't come with a floppy disk. An external USB floppy was optional - and, I opted out. Instead, I bought a iomega USB ZipCD and a stack of CDs. Now, if I need to give a file to someone, I can either send it over the Internet (storage space at school) or burn it to a CD if net access isn't available. The only time I have ever needed a floppy, *ever*, is when I bought my network card - the drivers were on floppy. Ironic, I thought... I would have normally chosen to ftp the drivers onto the computer. But by then I had my CD writer, and I simply hooked it to my parents' computer and copied the drivers onto CD.
Coming back from winter break, I brought up an old headless Linux box from home. That computer has a floppy in it - so, if I ever need one, now I can just use that. But CDs are so popular now, and the Internet is so easy to access, floppies are almost worthless.
By the way, for you out there concerned about alternate boot media, yes, I can burn bootable CDs. And they're much more useful (ie. you can fit much more on them) than the standard 1.44M floppy.
-Karl /dos]# file msdos.sys
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[root@kgutwin
[root@kgutwin
msdos.sys: fsav (linux) virus (17518-87)
The old commodore ieee488 drives like 8250 and 8050
used 100 tpi instead of 96tpi and manage to stuff 1.2mb
on a standart 5 1/4 DD DS floppy. Sounds like the same
ideer.
I know just transferring 1.4mb can be painfully slow. But hey, MO SPACE MO BETTA!
Maybe noone died during the manufacture of floppy disks, but I'm sure there are lots of people who got a heart attack when the "Abort, Retry, Ignore" message popped up ;-)
SWEET MOTHER OF GOD! THESE DAMN THINGS JUST WON'T GO AWAY
But seriously though, the single thing all other floppy replacements lack is the ability to write to them using just the standard BIOS calls (like your hard drives, floppy). What good is a CDRW if you have to boot up, load software, andfigure out what you want to write and to where.
The only time I have ever needed a floppy, *ever*, is when I bought my network card - the drivers were on floppy. Ironic, I thought... I would have normally chosen to ftp the drivers onto the computer.
Ummm, if you are installing a NIC, wouldn't that mean you (probably) are not yet connected to the network? Wouldn't that make ftp access rather difficult?
Blaming guns for crime is like blaming keyboards for first posters. More Guns != More Crime
ROTFLMAONPIMP...ahhhhhhhhhhh..ooppppss.. PIMP that time...and they say there's nothing good on the net :)
.sig under construction
Sure, that will protect the CD's, until some Butch Cassidy wanna-be decides you've got money in there and uses too much dynamite. ;)
Yes, I have read the Communist Manifesto. I've also studied how it worked out in the real world; the main difference was that the Nazis don't lie as much. Nazis claimed that they were going to do really nasty things and then did them. (Shame on everyone who didn't believe that Hitler meant what he said in Mein Kampf.) Communists claimed that they were going to make the world a wonderful place for everyone, then did the same things as the Nazis plus destroyed the economy. Then they lied about that too. (It took all of Stalin's well-publicized 5 year plans just to get Russia back to where they were before they overthrew the Tsar -- and the Tsars were the reason Russia was a backwards nation in 1914 in spite of having far more natural resources than any other nation, including the US. But the commies kept right on claiming that they were making great advances, right up until there was nothing left to "nationalize" (steal)and the Soviet state went bankrupt.)
My information was lost, and not once or twice but several times. I took me some time to put all the stuff together again!
I got replacement disks but they were of no use, one out of 5 or 6 will be defective. I bought new drive a couple of times, different computer. No joy.
Then I tried Iomega's "technical support". I was left hanging in the phone most of the time (at international phone rates....).
I hope they go burst.... Great idea, poor performance....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Obviously you have not heard about the infamous click of death.
I lost countless disks to this problems with several different drives until I threw the thing away....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, you are.
To dial in to the net or configure a laptop to connect to the net in a network that is not yours in an office that is not yours is not instantaneous (and depending on the company/country/planet you are visiting, sometimes is pretty painful). Perhaps you could work in another persons machine, but they will not necesarily the environment you require. And some companies are so paranoid about security that will not let you touch their computers or. heaven forbids, download something.
With mobile media you can overcome some of thos situations. I don't trust a company who knows where to keep my data also, so I prefer to have my data safely stored in a CD at home....er..... well, nothing is perfect I guess...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Forget about 3.5" disks. Bring back 5.25"!! Think about how much more we can store on that old real estate!! Or the Tandy tape-drive! There are many more better options of older technology to revive than the boring 3.5" disk...
A 32 Mb floppy is a stupid idea. First, reliability of both the media and the drive are poor. Second, a Minidisc holds 140 Mb and is faster and the drive is smaller. I'd much rather use minidiscs for cameras, PC's, etc. When the drive costs 1000x the cost of the media, somebody is being rather stupid. This whole thread is a bogus idea. In fact, the entire web site is bogus. No, actually the whole web is bogus. I hate this bogus computer. I'm going to kick this computer in the screen. here i got right now... ready... set... #&@#(*^&#(*&$@#%&$(
And while I'm no storage engineer, I'm willing to bet that the massive increase in storage space on the same physical medium will result in a much greater risk of data loss. What used to be 4 or 5 K of data lost on a small physical failure would now be a few megs. Ick.
-Gabe
Has anybody considered that this could very well be a good thing for _new_ systems? I think something like the ol' 1.44MB floppy is always going to be around. The article mentions only USB versions are available, but that could easily change. Other posters have pointed out the inadequacy of the current floppy bus, and I agree with that. So...why not phase out the relatively dated system with something like this? If it was introduced into new systems, it could become a standard over time. I think there will always be a use for cheap magnetic media.
;-)
Or it could be like the backup-to-VHS thingie that someone gave me, collecting dust somewhere around here. But if you ask me, anything is better than floppies. 'cept VHS tape.
RN
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Ummm. That's where the "Ironic, I thought", fit in...
One thing you forgot to mention: the IBM 1GB Microdrive. Basically a 1 Gig hard drive, fits into a PCMCIA card. I know this makes me a laptop loser(tm), I run my life of an i Series thinkpad, but it's a pretty damn good storage method (if you can shell out the dough). /. hasn't seen a dead floppy more frequently than a scratched CD).
I can't afford one yet, but is HIGH on my wish list.
The main point is that floppy is dead. Everyone with a desktop is in a parrallel world -- laptops more and more these days don't bother with internal floppy drives, and that means that when push comes to shove, we can't boot of them once everything goes all flaky.
Bring on bootable CD BIOS and understand that the 3 1/4 floppy is as dead as 5 1/2 floppy. Even better, bring on bootable PCMCIA BIOS and bootable network drive BIOS. The only reason that you non-laptop people have floppy drives (and this comes from my experience working in a retailer) is that floppy drives are as cheap as dirt.
Not that fancy store bought dirt -- I can't compete with that stuff.
Floppy must die. Read my lips, no new floppies.
Okay, now I'm rambling. So I'm drunk, sue me. Nonetheless, the floppy is long obsolete, people have already mentioned that the stability of the medium is questionable (can anyone say corrupted FAT? I don't believe that anyone on
USB fancyness like the USB key mentioned recently or CD/DVD, or PCMCIA are the only things that make sense universally. This is a notepad-centric view, admittedly, but the fact that I have a hell of a time booting a distro so that I can get M$ Windoze off my ThinkPad(tm: big blue) means that everone needs to lose the floppy addiction, especially the open-source community.
Wow, that was vitriolic. I need to drink less.
Everything above may well be poorly-thought out / spelled. Blame the beer, not me.
I just finished The Jungle. Countless people did not fall into the vats. Jurgis heard one story about a fellow that fell into a vat, and it was told as a legend. Ass.
"Good. I thought we were in real trouble for a minute." -Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
how do they get 22 times the storage density out of a media without running into problems.
there is the obvious reliability. floppies regularly fail as it is. does this compound the problem?
if this much storage could be had from a floppy, what kept manufacturers from doing this in the first place.
this is not some compression algorithm, you actually have to have some place to put all these bits. there is a physical limit to how close you can put bits and still differentiate between them. magnetic forces go up as the inverse sqare of the distance.
one way the bits can be put closer together is by giving them a stronger charge, but there is a chemical limit inherent to to each media. as long as you are using standard floppies, you're stuck with the same limit as floppies have right now.
do these guys just wave a magic wand?
I think that this is a really great idea. Many companies are shipping computers (Imac, some laptops) without floppies these days. Disks are cheap, cheap, and most importantly cheap. Capacity of this size could spark a revolution.
Just one reality check. I understand the concept of how it might be possible to squeeze more data onto a floppy, but how about getting floppy drives to read them? Old floppy drives will not understand the format. Manufactures will undoubtedly put new drives to handle the new format if this idea pans out, but the old drives that are in your machine right now will probably not be able to handle it.
----------------------
Kurt A. Mueller
kurtm3@bigfoot.com
PGP key id:0x75D2DCCD
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Agree, Compaq released a dual Superdisk/fast-floppy drive in 98 and I don't recall seeing anyone use it (and we were a Compaq shop).
9 8b .html)
(http://www5.compaq.com/newsroom/pr/1998/pr0204
I use my CD-writer for most backups (or server space at work)
**Vanuatu or bust**
All kiddin' aside, if it adds a buck or two to the cost of a floppy drive, I'm all for it. But I have the feeling that it's an expensive little hack.
Now why can't they just make my 700MB CD-Rs hold 1.5GB?
The ubiquitous floppy unreliable? Check out the floppy raid project over a Sourceforge. Raid 5 and on 1.68k's no less.
Yes, I know; the USB Smartmedia reader costs about as much as a floppy and the floppy adapter is a hack. And yes, I know, if the floppy adapter makes it, manufacturers will replace the floppy drive with a Smartmedia reader and bypass the clunky floppy adapter. Nevertheless, I *do* have a 32MB floppy, today.
A friend spilled a beer on one of my mac disks in '84. ONce it dried, we forced the slide open, and the disk was fine.
Even if the quality level had been maintained (which I don't think has happened), the data is much more dense. A it now takes a much smaller flawto cover/crunch a bit out of existence.
What I'd like to see on the drivers for these is massive error correction. 38 bits will detect 2 bit errors and correct one bit errors. Rather than putting a byte and it's correction code in a single place, spread it around the disk. Make certain that if the disk is physically damaged at any point, there is information elsewhere to retrieve it. I'd even reserve a sector for an XOR of the other sectors. Yep, it costs space, but less data is better than irretrievable data.
Okay...that's great...I now have a terabyte in used disks laying around, but what about the fact that floppy disks just ain't reliable?
:)
Though for the purposes mentioned the other day (carting around powerpoint presentations) and mp3 players, it could be nice. Wonder if I could compress it enough to fit a whole album on a floppy - lose some quality, but my car stereo isn't that great
There've been many many alternatives. The IBM uDrives, (orig. 340 MB and the new 1 GB+) are simply one example.
The point is that none of them supplanted the floppy except for mebbe the CD Drive. CD's are standard equipment on all PCs, most BIOSs support booting from the CD, and CD-R/Ws are *almost* a standard item.
Unless it's markedly better I don't see any new technology supplanting CD. DVD perhaps when it comes down in price, or solid-state when it becomes both cheaper & more standardized but that's it.
As to your drinking - get some help. It's pathetic you drink & read /.
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.
Anyway, since my ultralight doesn't have an internal FDD, I think I'll try to source one of these drives and see how it goes...
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What could they add to the Linux Router Project floppies? A screensaver with pictures of your "favorite stars" like Britney Spears and N'Sync? Maybe they'll use the space to distribute Nazi and communist propaganda to millions of unsuspecting users.
Personally, I think they should use the space to include a SETI client. (By the way, I'm bleeding with sarcasm).
Ahh yes, good old Apple ][ 5.25" floppies. Virtually indestructable -- I can remember tearing the media out of the jacket, playing frisbee, and then putting the media into the drive (some disassembly required) and actually have the media usable. Even the non-certified flip side was often usable (paper punch extra), albeit with a slightly higher error rate.
What seems strange about floppies is that I have several re-used factory Win31 floppies that always seem to work. Newer floppies frequently seem to fail, although I do have some that get used a lot that work in spite of being used in all kinds of dusty, seldom-used floppy drives. It's kind of a crapshoot as to how reliable a 'new' floppy will be.
On a slightly off-topic note, I can remember desperately wishing that PKZIP.EXE could generate parity disk(s) for multi-disk span sets, since it seemed that at least 25% of the time one of the disks would stop working, rendering the span set worthless. When traveling far with a span set I often made two sets with the idea that I could substitute another floppy to finish extraction.
I find it hard to believe that a new 3.5 floppy format would find market success. There's too many entrenched players at all market levels -- Zip and SuperDisk at the low end, Jaz at the high end, CDR everywhere else with writable DVD formats looming on the horizon (Apple's DVD authoring system will likely be just enough market acceptance to stabilize a media/drive standard there).
The place that seems to have the most room for innovation is the high-capacity removable market -- 8GB or more on a single cart. Writable DVD will likely hurt Jaz as an archival or temporary media, but I think there's still a need for a fast, high-capacity, removable rewritable disk system.
Sometimes floppies are the cheapest and easiest method of data transfer/archival.
When I was an undergrad, my ISP was my university. Up until shortly before I graduated, connecting took anywhere from 2-3 minutes to a couple of hours due to the small size of their modem bank, and you were automatically kicked off after 2 hours. Downloading files of any size was not easy with my old 28.8K modem, and frequently it was much quicker and less frustrating to sneakernet data back and forth using floppies.
Now I have a DSL connection and just ftp files back and forth.
Over the course of a couple of years I probably purchased 200-300 disks in groups of 10 or 20. As Imation disks were what was available, they were generally what I purchased, although once their quality level became apparent, I did my best to find alternatives. I bought something like 100-150 imation disks and by now have tossed at least a third of those disks because they were immediately unusable or quickly became unreliable.
I no longer store anything of value on Imation disks, nor do I leave trivial files on them for more than a couple of days.
While having 15-20 out of 100-150 disks turn out to be defective immediately after purchase does not count as an exhaustive statistical study, it does seem indicative of a larger problem.
I have better luck with diskettes that I've dumpter dived.
Like Andre060 mentions below, I might have wondered if my drive was at fault, but I've seen Imation diskettes fail at home, at friend's houses, and in many school computers, so I kind of doubt that it's just the floppy drive.
The bottom line for me is that the risk isn't worth it. If I want disks I'll spend a few cents more for the privilege of imagining that my data will still be there tomorrow.
<flashback>
"The elephant never forgets"
zeke
Unless you have an iMac.
-- iCEBaLM
I have one of the old parallel port Zip drives. Yeah, it can be slow, but it really isn't too bad. Sure it only holds 100 MB, and there is the possibility of the click 'o' death (but I hear that is only with the newer drives) - but it has been a great thing to have - and rugged as hell, too.
What I do to make it the most portable, is I carry it in a little case (Zip makes one, but a good sized CD player case, with room for power supply and CDs, will work too, and are cheaper), along with a couple of Zip disks, the parallel cable, the power supply, and the most important part - a DOS floppy with Zip tools. Since the majority of machines I come across are Windows or DOS based, this isn't a problem - hook up the drive, pop the zip tools disk in, and run the mounting program (guest) - and you are set.
Not as simple as a floppy, I'll grant - but very portable - better than hoping to find a scsi mounted or IDE Zip drive on the box. The only problem is that you are limited to DOS and Windows boxes (I currently have my zip drive hosted on my Linux box at home - so I know that Linux supports it, but I don't know if it is possible to build such a simple portable tools disk for Linux - anyone know?).
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This drive has a few advantages over the standard floppy:
However, the market is crowded in this area, and later this year a 500MB 'floppy' technology is going to be released, the PlayDrive or something, and the disks are small. Now if they would license the technology for free then maybe a real floppy replacement would be created, but if it remains proprietary then its success may be limited.
The problem with USB is that you cannot boot from it at the moment. This would require BIOS support, and most BIOS manufacturers are more interested in adding overclocking features rather than hardware support to them at the moment. Still, this makes a pretty good laptop disk drive for simple file transfer (unlike CD-R which is too much effort to transfer a single file). Now if only ATX cases came with a space for front-facing USB ports to be inserted...
So, even though I will occasionally chastise people for buying low-end or cheaper mid-range stuff, I still reserve the right to buy them myself, should I decide that reliability (or functionality or whatever else the low-end or mid-range product is lacking) just isn't a factor in this purchase. I really hate advising people to use anything of debatable quality, because I know it will come back to haunt them. When it comes to me, I know that I can handle a couple floppies going bad from time to time. I don't have that same level of assurance when it comes to an anonymous stranger. I hope this explains why my post seemed to contradict itself.
Anyways, in response to your question, MO drives actually have taken off, but not in the desktop PC world. If you're worried about being compatible with your friends' PCs with ZIP drives, then you definitely would be better off buying a ZIP drive.
But why in the world would you want to buy multiple CD-RWs and create images of your hard drive? Wouldn't it be better to actually write to the hardware directly, at much, much higher speeds? Granted, a 10X CD-RW drive can write 640MB fairly quickly, but how long is that 10X drive going to take to write several gigabytes? Especially if it's over the EIDE ports, where you can only access one channel at a time, per port... which is a major problem if you have your hard drive and CD-RW on the same port (ie, master and slave respectively on the primary EIDE controller).
Argh. This is all getting much more complicated than I had intended, and I'm not sure that I'm making too much sense. The basic advantages are thus:
Advantages of MO over CD-RW
Disadvantages of MO
Basically, I'd say that MO is my favorite removable format. Tape isn't too bad, as it's damn cheap, but it suffers from other problems, most notably reliability and speed. You need to make sure that your backup tapes are good before you store them. Also, tapes are only good for backup, not much else. You can't really play MP3 files off of them...
It's true that floppy disks suffer from reliablity problems. Most cheap removable drives have had that plague them at least once in their life during the product development cycle. I've heard so many horrible stories about Iomega Zip drives and/or disks going bad, I've stayed away from them. SyQuest (and their decendant Castlewood) offer ultra-cheap drives and media with about the same or slightly worse reliability. I decided to go with SyQuest when I bought a removable drive. At the time when Zip disks were 100MB, mine were 1GB.. and cheaper! Eventually, I decided that playing around with parallel ports was pretty stupid, so I bought an Ultra2 Wide SCSI host adapter and some cool SCSI peripherals. Now, I've got four external U2W hard drives in an external rackmount chassis (bought it on ebay for a fraction of its actual worth), an external magneto-optical (MO) drive that reads and writes 2.6GB media at speeds near hard drives (I can actually install Windows 95 on a disc, without it being too slow to use), plus a very cheap 230MB magneto-optical (MO) 3.5" full-height drive. Unfortunately, as you might guess, the FH 230MB MO drive has given me some problems, as you don't really find too many FH 3.5" bays on PC cases. It doesn't really seem worth spending the money to make it external or fit a 5.25" bay, because the 2.6GB media is so damn cheap (~$30). The 230MB media is not much cheaper than that, even in quantity. My original plan was to replace my floppy drive with that MO drive, but it doesn't seem terribly likely that'll ever happen. So, I bought one of those Imation SuperDrives that stores 120MB or 1.44MB per floppy. It's very cool, except the media is way overpriced. Right now, I have only three superfloppies for it, and I don't plan on ever buying any more. Remember, guys, there's an entire universe outside of the IDE world. Firewire and SCSI MO drives offer incredible advantages over IDE, floppy, and parallel port superfloppies, not to mention CD-Rs and CD-RWs. I hesitate to imagine making nightly backups to CD-RW or superfloppy. Eeechh.
Hey, don't say that: now at last we can have (slightly) more reliable floppies.
With more than 10 megs, you've got plenty of space to use Hamming codes[?], which means much better security.
Of course that will make floppy I/O slower, but hey, if you want speed, you don't use floppies !
I live in a country where full-time internet access is still far from widespread. Floppies are essential for us. It is the only tool we have to transport small amounts of data (e.g. documents) between two places (e.g. office and home).
Thomas Miconi
Now, I've read a lot of posts bitching about the floppy. "Oh the floppy doesn't hold very much." "You can't archive things for long times on a floppy." "Zips have replaced it." "CD-Rs are much more useful!"
All of these arguements are valid, true. But you know, when I'm at school or the office and I need to move a small file to my house...damn its nice to pop in a floppy and take it home. I don't have a PC with a Zip. They're kinda hard to find. Not impossible, but not as convenient as a floppy. Same situation with a CD-R. I have a CD burner at home (go little 2x! go!) but not at work or school.
And so this is why the floppy has survived for so long: Convenience. Nothing on the market has come close to being as convenient to use as the floppy. The Zip came *this* close, but never made it.
So, until something can be as ubiquitous as the floppy, it'll still be around years from now.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Just off the top of my head, the already-mentioned Linux Router Project, the freesco project, Tom's (very cool) rtbt, etc. I use tomsrtbt all the time as an emergency rescue floppy, and I can only imagine all the cool stuff he could do with ~16-18 times more disk space (the level of functionality already acheived in 1.7Mb is amazing)...
Heck, imagine having a floppy-based install where you don't have to disk swap for more drivers to enable networking? Slackware might actually be able to use disk sets other than A and N again on floppies... (not that I hold that against them, trying to fit things like X onto floppies is just silly in a masochistic sense) And I don't think it'd be too long before somebody makes a ZipSlack analog for this new tech.
And all the ram-based/cdrom-based distros (i.e. ones that load into ram off a floppy like LRP or the demo linux projects) would have a cool new way to enable persistant storage of more than the smallest things (e.g. logging in HD-less LRP systems).
--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Error Correction.
Even if 2 out of 3 bits are for EC, that's still 10MB. Also, I wonder what people are doing to these floppies. Of course they are going to get corrupted if you toss them around and leave them sitting on top of the monitor (come on, admit it people, you know you do it). I haven't had serious problems with floppies kept in a cool, dry place away from magnetism.
I have to admit though, I don't trust important data to floppies. The irreplaceable stuff is backed up 3 ways: 1. On a second HD. 2. On CDR and 3. (some of it) on a remote server, which in turn has its own nightly tape backup.
I live on the US East Coast so I don't see this system failing unless I have a fire that melts my CDs and my HDs followed by a California disaster that takes out the data center and its tapes.
Hmmm... maybe I should get another remote backup in the Midwest. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle
LOL!!! The Jungle mentioned in a comment on a floppy drive. I hope your hyperbole is intentional, because it's truly entertaining.
If it isn't, well... you're a sad case and all I have to say is... this is a floppy drive we're talking about. Comparing it to the tragedy played out in Sinclair's novel is just... well... LOL!!! funny.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
(shudder) The thought of 10TB of AOL just went through my mind.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
but what about the transfer speed. would the technology to get the x-fer speed off the disk fast enough to stream an mp3 to a decoder for example, end up costing as much as the memory stick in the end anyway?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Yet another removable storage medium. Why?? There is hardly a computer anywhere that isn't connected to the Internet, and with websites like Driveway and Xdrive which allow you to store your files for free on their servers and access them from any computer with a web browser, who needs disks?
Am I the only one who thinks disks are dead?
This sig is umop apisdn.
"
Not to mention that every computer user on the planet has a floppy drive.
"
... that won't read these disks.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Finally a use for all those AOL disks. At least the CDs still make excellent drink coasters!
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
...that will fit 32 MB onto a regular floppy disk...
According to many Slashdot readers last October, this is not a good idea.
Come on, "How many workers are going to die in the new factories that this new floppy design will require?"
I do not think that anyone has ever died during the manufacture of floppy disks.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
What's the access times on these? Will they be as slow as regular floppies? That's what kept me from purchasing a Superdisk drive last time (and instead bought a Zip, which is speedy).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The "cooler than heck" Linux Router Project can't get anything over 1.88M to boot, so it would seem they couldn't do much of anything with these other than use then as coasters.
Floppies are dead. Move on. Nothing to see here.
Imagine what the cooler-than-heck Linux Router Project could do with these!
I'm going to guess that nobody is going to use this drive with the LRP. Yes, we will do anything to fit more functionality onto our measly 1.68MB floppies, but spending money is strictly forbidden. The cost of one of these suckers would be better spent on an actual router.
Damn it! I must have thrown away 10 terabytes worth of AOL disks!
Are you kidding? What am I going to fit on a 32MB disk? Anything smaller than that I can email where I need it, anything larger I can burn to a CD. With all the file-sharing going on, I can walk into a computer lab naked and still get to any files I need.
The only time I've needed a floppy in the past two years was to give to our career services center. I've got a mac with a CD-burner, but no floppy drive, so I offered to put it on CD for them - they didn't even know that was possible.
I'd much prefer the "USB key" memory discussed yesterday for personal file storage, I already have a 256k SIMM on my keychain (non-functional); memory I could use would be great!
Let legacy technology die, please....
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
A lot of people are yacking about reliability. Quite honestly these drives promise to be just as reliable as any other removable media (except solid state stuff - but that is pricey compared to a floppy)
If you treat a floppy right it will do well by you. But if you bend it, sit it next to your speaker coil (and people will) leave it in your car window on a sunny day, of course you're gonna have problems. Just like you have problems with CDs when you scratch them.
It would be one thing if this was made by some unknown company out of China, but it isn't. Matsushita is a large company that knows what they are doing. Also, don't you think they took how people would treat the floppy when they were designing the drive????
My LS120 drive is a very reliable drive (more so than that SPARQ 1 gig that I was sadly an early adopter of). One very neat thing about my LS120 drive is that I have had floppies that were impossible to read in my standard floppy drives for one reason or another, but I would plop them in my LS 120 and the data would fly off without hesitation!!
So be careful with your media (like you're supposed to) and use drives wisely (make backups of important stuff - it's cheap enough to make a couple with this drive). You've heard this stuff over and over again, but there are always those who are caught with their pants down when something goes wrong. I'd bet alot of the dissers of this new drive don't have a tape backup for their hard drive even.
So stop the pre-whining/pre-judging until at least it has been reviewed by somebody.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Ahh. And they are cheap. And people have hundreds of them at home sitting. Not to mention that every computer user on the planet has a floppy drive.
- They're slow
- They're fragile
- They don't have enough space no matter how much you can incrementally shove in
- They waste more resources in packaging than other media
And so on.It's time to grow up. It's time to let go of the old technologies of yesterday. They're called cruft. They're called legacy. They slow us down and they make life harder and more expensive. There is no reason why, in the twenty-first century, that we should still be beholden to technology from decades ago. Power grids are failing in California because of their insistence on using old tech. Why would we inflict that on our own personal computers? Growing up means learning to let go.
How much of this money that's been poured into incrementally improving floppy drives could've been spent on producing the next great thing in holographic storage? How many companies have independently squandered fortunes in this field? (I can count at least six in the past five years.) How far would the state of the art have come if we'd concentrated on what was best for the future of computing, instead of pandering to people's distorted views of what they want (more of the same) and not what they need (something radically different).
Inventing a new floppy isn't relying on tried-and-true designs. It's a whole new beast, with its own bugs and its own manufacturing problems. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle a century ago, he described how countless lives were lost in the meatpacking industry every year in having workers fall into vats of processed meat. How many workers are going to die in the new factories that this new floppy design will require? You can't just tack a new process onto an old assembly line; it'll require massive retooling and reconfiguration. Insurance rates will rise, and the price will become unbearable--unless they sell at a loss and drive competitors out of business, only to raise prices twofold in the end.
Floppies are not the answer to our problem. Old problems don't require old solutions. They require new and exciting ones, ones that push the envelope, that expand the field of human possibilities. Future economies, nay civilizations, will be made or broken on the wheel of technology. Let's not hold progress back by clinging to yesterday's superstitions.
Read the rest of this comment...
Yeah, I agree - floppies are dead. Let them rest in piece.
They only survive today because PCs have piss-poor support for boot devices, hell I work with files all day that wouldn't even fit on a Zip250 much less a 32MB floppy.
32MB isn't enough for most OSes to boot from, and even for those that are small enough it'll still transfer over the floppy bus - painfully slow for 1.44MB of data, just as slow for 32MB of data. It should require new media in any case, much like you can't format a 1.44MB floppy 2.88MB in a 2.88 floppy drive.
Of course if it doesn't need new media then it'll probably live in the land pioneered by Commodore's SFD (or was that SDF? May have crossed wires with memories of Robotech/Macross) series drives. Same media as smaller density drives, massive capacity (My SFD-2002 stored 2MB on a 5.25" DD disk - in the early 80s), yet completely unreliable for prolonged access or long-term storage.
Just let the floppy die. The time would be better spent making USB/Firewire media bootable... (like they are on Macs)
Along came those crappy Zip-drives with 100 MB and they nearly made it 'cause they were relatively cheap and became almost ubiquitious. Iomega was smart and went for broad distribution over profits trying to become a standard but eventually their quality-control problems, competition, and internal problems overwhelmed them. Now their Zip drives have been passed by. They've tried variations - 200 MB Zips and 40 MB "Clicks" but the train has left the station.
I don't know where you've been, but I'd have to say that ZIP drives have been a phenomenal success. I've definitely seen more ZIP drives than SuperDisk drives. Mac and Dell and Gateway all offer them, and if you go to college these days, you seriously can't get by without a ZIP drive. At my school, all of them had one, and that was in 1997.
I'd say that ZIP drives made it all right.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, I saw the new DataPlay format. A lot of money behind it, tiny, rugged and 250 megs per side for a total of 500 megs in DVD-R format in a protected case the size of a Smart Card. See it at this web page.
It does have optional "content protection" but it shouldn't stop people from using for their own material. The engineers I talked with seemed pretty open to drivers being written for various operating systems (they want to sell hardware). Come September, expect to see these suckers all over the place.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to buy a disk-on-chip for the same or less money, and thus eliminate both moving parts and a flimsy, unreliable boot drive? Hell, for the same money you could put in a boot CD and drive - pull the "ejectable" jumper on a drive so equipped and voilla!
This sounds like it will be as reliable in practice as say... 56K modems or some other such nasty kludge.
Please, don't buy this.. I beg you people
+++ ATH0 +++
Never caught on. Unless there's a massive push on many fronts, this won't make it either. CDs are so cheap in quantity (just ask AOL) that the barrier to entry is high - why support a new format that no one uses?
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
I have a box of 230MB Fujitsu magneto-optical disks in front of me, and those are five years old. Mountable SCSI device, too; you could put a bootable system on them.
yeah, but floppies don't look as cool when you microwave them... ;-)
I remember back in "The Day" when I new some crazy kids in the dorm who wrote some sort of script to auto-order member kits from AOL, just for the floppies. They'd come back every week or so from the post office with an armload of the things. I don't think AOL every caught on, the mail room guys just got pissed so they quit.
--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
On second thought, isn't that going to make it easier to destroy data accidentally?
Dr. Blow: Mr Bond, the disk.
Bond: Ok.
Chick: You bahstard.
Dr. Blow: Hey what's wrong with thing.
Bond: I told her to keep it in her purse hoping that by the time she retrieved it would be so mishandled as to be useless.
Chick and Dr. Blow: You Bahstard.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I'm guessing these things aren't any more reliable than regular 1.44MB floppies.
That's as much of a reason for me welcoming the demise of floppies as their diminutive size.
We need something that is larger, as cheap, and more reliable. Wait a minute, how about CD-R(W)s?
They are the floppy replacement. Forget this kind of stuff.
Floppies were popular 'cause they were ubiquitious - classic fax-machine effect. Without that they were just a pricy non-standard piece of equipment.
To succed they had to be cheap, rugged, and LOTS of folks had to have one.
Along came those crappy Zip-drives with 100 MB and they nearly made it 'cause they were relatively cheap and became almost ubiquitious. Iomega was smart and went for broad distribution over profits trying to become a standard but eventually their quality-control problems, competition, and internal problems overwhelmed them. Now their Zip drives have been passed by. They've tried variations - 200 MB Zips and 40 MB "Clicks" but the train has left the station.
Then the former folks from Syquest (the ones who pioneered much of the technology used in Zips but who lost out to Iomega in the consumer arena) came back with Castlewood and it's impressive Orb technology. 2 GB and fast with reasonably priced media but they don't have enough distribution to achieve broad penetration and without that they're just a niche product.
Also recently there was the SuperDisk - able to read a generic 1.44 3.5" floppy plus it's own 100 MB ones. Neat trick but with a standard floppy drive US$7, a USB version $40 for the iMac folks, and a known-quantity Zip for US$75 what was the point of shelling out US$200?
So now we've got another floppy contender. It's coming into a tough market.
CD-R/W offers 660 MB in a fairly standard format and at speeds up to 12x. Quality media is US$1-US$2, market penetration is high and there are even versions on digital cameras and other consumer devices now.
The DVD-R/CD-RW drives have just been introduced ofering high-speed play, reasonably fast recording, access to lots of devices and of course lots of storage.
On the other end we've got solid-state media expanding in density with 32 MB & 64 MB becoming popular at reasonable price points.
We've even started seeing USB-connected solid-state memory (see yesterday's /.) shipping for ~US$50 for 8 MB, surely larger is to follow.
What are the odds of another floppy-drive format making it?
Well, pretty slim. There are faster, and there are more capacity, and there are smaller form-factor, and there are more stable. With this new one excelling at none of these and only being so-so at all of them it seems destined for the also-ran list. It offers nothing that can't be gotten cheaper / more standard / more reliable / faster /etc. elsewhere.
Sorry.
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.
Maybe it's because the profit margin on the average floppy today is so small, or maybe it's just my imagination, but those disks just don't seem to last as long as they used to.
Nearly every day in the dorms, being the "computer geek" everyone knew, I'd get someone running down to me with a floppy that they had saved their 27 page final report on, that suddenly was showing disk errors. I shudder to think of the number of times I had to give them the bad news that floppies aren't the most reliable methods of storage anymore, and their work was lost.
So, this means 31 extra megs of term papers to lose. Joy!
That's exactly the same thing I thought upon reading the blurb. Years ago when I used an apple //c on a regular basis, I almost *never* had a disk go bad on me. Most of them - and I bought the crudiest, cheapest, $30-for-100-disks kind I could find - still work 15 years after I acquired them. Admittedly, we're talking ***LOW*** data storage rates, so perhaps the individual bits weren't as suceptible to random EM fields, but still...
In the early 90's when I started using msdos pc's, the 1.44 meg disks I bought were also pretty reliable. You could buy sony, fujitsu, 3M, etc. Most of those disks still work today.
Nowadays Imation (the-diskette-manufacturer-formerly-known-as-3M) has the cheap disk market pretty sewn up around here. Walmart, school bookstores, and corner convenience stores all seem to stock Imation disks and nothing else. The downside? I tend to get 1 or 2 bad diskettes from every box of 10 I buy. This is _straight_ out of the box. I stuff one in the drive, write something to it, and find out that it's immediately unretrievable.
Part of the trouble is the stinkin' cheap quality of the disks. If you have one, pull it out and try flexing it slightly. Note that the two halves of the disk shell are only connected together at the corners. Imagine how many dust particles get through the unsealed seam during regular use. Now imagine those dust particles carving deep trenches in the regions where your data is stored. Lovely.
If you have get one of these drives, be careful what brand media you buy for them.
zeke