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Death to the 3.5" Floppy?

Posted by michael on from the ad-te-omnis-caro-veniet dept.

BawbBitchen writes "PC World in NZ is running this story about PC makers struggling to try to kill the floppy as a standard PC part. Gateway has started to take $10 off the price of a PC if you order the PC without the floppy. Hum, well my Mac does not have a floppy and I do not miss it & my Linux Server has one that I have never used. Does anyone out there still use their floppy?"

4 of 1,126 comments (clear)

  1. BOOT DISK by shaldannon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maybe I'm the only one left, but I find my floppy drive real handy for booting the computer still; particularly for installing operating systems...

    This is particularly true since I still have to boot off a floppy to install Linux (something about autoboot and my scsi CD-ROM)...

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    1. Re:BOOT DISK by AndyChrist · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yeah, and most surviving american cars from the 70s and 80s run great, too. Doesn't mean the vast majority weren't pieces of crap with serious quality control problems.

      Not all Iomega drives fail/failed, but enough have that anyone who has used many, or knows more than a handful of people who have, is likely to know at least one person who had a bad drive, and is likely to have encountered numerous bad disks.

      I've never come across a bad Jaz drive, but I HAVE had a bad disk.

      BTW, GOOD RIDDANCE to floppies. I wouldn't be saying that, but for the fact that the quality of the media has been crap for the last 6 years or more. To my knowledge you simply cannot buy good floppies (that is to say, floppies you can actually trust with your data) anymore.

      I worked in a few university computer labs, and not a week went by someone didn't lose a paper (or ALL of their papers for that semester) to a bad floppy disk...and that was just in the hours I was working.

      I'd sooner trust my data to a stack of post-it notes than a floppy disk. Older disks lasted for years...All (all I've checked, anyhow) my 20 year old apple disks which are still flawless, as are my 8 year old 1.44s. Disks I got more recently, I'd trust for maybe a week.

      Used to be people would reuse AOL or Prodigy floppies...people would joke about how bad they were, how unreliable. And they were. Thing is, they were no less reliable than the average floppy is today.

      Floppies turned to crap when? When they got cheap.

      CDRs are getting really cheap now. What do you think is happening?

      A few years ago, I never saw the aluminum flaking right off of CDs which hadn't been abused. I have seen this in the past year.

  2. Mt. Rainier drives should fit the bill by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is an effort to make CD's usable as an 'optical floppy'. You need new drives to write them, but only new drivers to read them. Here's just one FAQ that fell out of Google.

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  3. Re:CD-RW too hard to use by Stormie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe it's changed in Windows XP or MacOS X. But for Windows 2000 and Redhat Linux 7.2 I have to install and run a separate program and laboriously pick out which files I want to burn and finally say "go".

    It has changed in MacOS X.