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Dell Dropping The Floppy
adambwells writes "Dell wants to stop including floppy drives as standard hardware on its Dimension line of desktops, and will start this practice later this quarter, as reported in this Yahoo article. Says Dell's product marketing: We would like to see customers migrate away from floppies as quickly as possible, because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago." They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
I love the idea of these things, but I wonder - can you boot off a USB device yet?
:)
What would be neat is booting off a bootable CD-R/W, and being able to use it in R/W mode. *That's* a floppy replacement.
Now if you could just put it in a square black plastic sleeve, you could boot it "old school"!
This has already happened. The other day, a vendor tried to sell me a motherboard with no FDD controller, no serial/parallel ports, and no PS/2 ports. Needless to say, I went elsewhere.
Yes, these features are old technology. But they're also mature technology - they work fine, now leave them alone!
You're not kidding... I seems the quality of drives and media has gone down. I remember being in high school ('86-'90), I'd carry about floppies with me all year around (blistering heat of summer and bone chilling cold of winter in Chicago). I'd never have a problem with them, I'd hope from one computer to another with the media. Try that now days... The floppy will work in one drive but not the next... WTF?!
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
I'd like to see SuperDrives as standard equipment on PC's.. either that or find some way to incorporate MiniDisc technology... (Hey.. maybe Sony will replace floppies w/ MD on the Vaio line..)
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
The big problem I have with floppies (really the only since I hardly ever use them) is the way they essentially tie up a computer. They bring your system to a grinding halt while they are accessing.
Don't believe me? Share your A: drive, open an FPS or MMPORG and have someone access your A: drive.
Of course, you may have that motherboard with the Manufactured By God label on it, so...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
However, both of these purposes have been "surplanted" by Microsoft's OS tools and monolithic device driver packages (read: Creative Labs). If your MS OS goes bad, you're supposed to plug in the CD Rom and use their tools to fix the problem, but this is sometimes not enough, or not advanced enough (eg , you're left with the extreme ends of choices of just doing a scandisk, or doing a complete reformat/reinstall of Windows). Advanced users know what programs to run and what specific files to tackle if something goes wrong. And because all Dell machines are Windows based, they don't consider the Linux users, where floppy rescue disks are still the norm.
Plus there's still the fact that floppies are good for the transferring of some media types, like short word processing documents and pictures. Particularly if we're talking parents and grandparents that have that donated pre-Pentium computer without a CD rom or the like, the floppy is an excellent way to get those types of things to them.
Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy? I'd rather see the choice of a floppy as an option to add on, rather that remove it all together or keeping it as a standard feature, but there's still plenty of reasons for floppy use.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Can you boot off a pen drive?
I think this is the main point of a floppy these days isn't it? A backup boot method... Sure you can use bootable CD-roms, but what if your CD-writer is on the machine that got toasted?
Floppies and the drives that run them are simple, cheap, abundant, and effective for what they do. Until there is a replacement that is standard on all PC's, these should always be available.
Then I need another fairly common media you can use to bootup an OS with in cases of catastrophic failures. The retail CD? Yeah, works good as long as it solves my problem. When I need a custom CD, I'll then need to burn a bootable CD-R (actually, preferrably a CD-RW for these purposes) in a special program made to burn CD's. And I can't even write on it at boot time if I'd need to, since the BIOS doesn't contain CD-RW drivers.
What's the best cheap, boot-time writeable, removable, non-floppy media out there on the market anyway? A bonus if it's common, since that would make it easier to get.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
From what I understand, this is often a difference in the drives rather than the media itself. Using preformatted media reduces the problem, but if you format a floppy on one machine, the alignment of its heads can impact the ability of another machine to read it.
There's nothing stopping you from adding a floppy to a Dell system that comes without one, is there? What's wrong with Dell removing a device from their standard configuration if most people (in Dell's opinion) don't want or need it? If you are in the minority of people who still need floppies (and BTW, I'm in that minority), just install your own.
I have no problem with the idea of abandoning the floppy disk, but good luck getting manufacturers to supply all their drivers on CD. I bought a USB2 card for my PowerMac last week and the driver still came on a floppy! Luckily I was able to copy the file from my PC over the network.
But I wouldn't want a machine without a floppy. They're cheap, easy to replace, and versatile; I can transfer data to and from a 10 year old machine without a hassle. True, such a situation doesn't occur often, but when it does I'm glad to have the floppy's versatility. Much of my file movement involves relatively small text files, for which floppies are optimal.
I want the floppy available when I need it, rather than buying external drives or following around with USB devices.
yeah, bummer. try that spiffy usb-crap to serial converter with old DOS applications.
the programming applications for HVAC (heating, ventilation and A/C) systems are often still DOS, and when they do have windows version they're half bugged and don't support nearly all the functionalities of the DOS ones. i've bought a few laptops for contracts, and had to return them due to no serial port!
say no to usb
Most of the personal computer industry is catching up to the changes Apple made 5 years ago, and they have been since the Apple ][.
Five(ish) years ago, Apple decided to allow 3rd party manufacturers of Mac hardware to bring down costs (much like the PC industry had done 15 years earlier). It almost killed them, and they stopped allowing this practice (well, very tightly clamped down on it) only a few months later.
Funny how one person's 5-years-too-soon may equal another person's 15-years-too-late, and what makes one can break the other.
You should probably consider preparing for the future. If one of your ZIP drives starts failing (in any of the ways in which they fail, including "My drive won't read this disk, but that one will", which is what caused a friend of mine to switch to CD-R at a time when the least expensive drive was ~$350), you're screwed. Besides, CD-R drives have so much more utility than ZIP drives. When I want to transport, ie, Windows 2000 SP3 to my parents' house, along with updated 30MB printer drivers, a Word Perfect Office service pack (@~80MB), along with about 200MB worth of additional drivers and updates, I hauled out a single 650MB CD-RW disk and burned the files in 5 minutes. I didn't have to pack an external ZIP disk, a floppy with drivers, and two-three ZIP disks to do it, either. Same goes for any of my customers' locations; they all have CD-ROM drives, but barely 1% of them have ZIP drives.
For the cost of a single ZIP drive, you could purchase two CD burners and a box of 5 CD-RWs
It's not that their send-to-device speed is slow, it's that the entire bus is slow. They require special host bridges to keep them from bogging the entire system down. That costs lots of resources to implement, and at this point in time with the present market saturation of USB devices and converters, there's no need to fumble with kludges anymore.
Why have you never cared for it? What on Earth is wrong with it? One plug type for ten thousand peripheral types, all with a unified interface reducing code overhead, physical space and confusion. Not to mention the need for stores to have a plethora of male-female, male-male, or female-female cables of a thousand different types on hand with customer service help required to figure out what cable you need to do what, often resulting in two adapters and a cable just to connect a device to a PC. When I'm working in the field, I frequently find myself having to run back to one of my suppliers to pick up a legacy cable that I seldom use, which costs time, gas money, and wear on my vehicle. Instead, I could carry a box of five or ten cables and be guaranteed that one of them will work with the peripherals they have on site. Otherwise, I could just borrow a cable from another of their USB/FireWire devices until I could get them a new cable.
You want choice? Do you still demand that software be ported to the Commodore 64 because it's such a tried and tested hardware platform? Do you want to go back to the days of an incompetent bus where you had to take half the cards out of your system and write down a map of IRQs and I/O addresses, then tweak half of them in order to install a sound card?
Back to floppy drives; I keep them in my systems because I need to support the lowest common denominator in my line of work, so I'll keep a floppy drive and disks around until less than 5% of my client base still have them. They're slow and unreliable, their bytes/square-inch ratio is horrible, and the media is far too succeptable to outside forces (moisture, sun/heat, magnetic forces, etc.) to make them a practical storage solution. One client recently got the idea in her head to back up their accounting workstation - on 800 floppy disks. It would have taken two (2) CD-Rs and perhaps an hour. She spent two days backing everything up. The lost wages alone would have covered the cost of a CD-RW drive, a field installation of same, and a spindle of CD-R discs. Then there's the lost productivity of having an employee and the accounting machine out of service for a day. Then there's the fact that if any of those disks fried, most of the backup would be useless (100MB+ datafiles spread across ~80 floppies = bad news).
When I need to use rescue tools on a workstation or server, sure, I could boot floppy disks. The first disk boots the system, the second disk contains mouse and additional low-level drivers, the third contains a partition management software package (stripped down to its bare essentials), the fourth package contains a (stripped down) copy of Ghost; a filesystem replication and backup utility, the fifth contains a small subset of hardware diagnostic tools, the sixth contains ...
Instead, I carry a single CD-R disc labelled "rescue" with all that and more, including some 200MB of the more common hardware drivers I require in the field. It boots in less than 1/10th the time it would take a floppy to boot, and I can be instantly productive. Not in the case with floppy disks. Swap disks, wait, wait, run program, wait, wait, use program, close program, swap disks, wait, wait, etc. ad nauseum (and believe me, sitting staring at a blinking cursor for 60% of the time it takes me to complete an otherwise 15 minute operation is nauseating). I also have to keep second copies of each of my disks, which means carring around two disk boxes with me - just in case one of their floppy drives is damaged, won't read my first disk, or eats my first disk. So now with twice the space of a single 24-CD wallet, I've got less than 5% of the capacity of a single CD-R disc.
Back to USB; a unified interface for peripherals that can operate at high speeds is the way of the future, and I for one am glad to see legacy devices going out the window. There's no technical or practical reason for the industry not to take the step forward. Quite frankly, the people who want to use legacy hardware probably shouldn't be concerned with this anyways, since they're obviously more concerned with keeping their 386s up and running than with purchasing modern hardware anyways.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Firewire? Big whoop. Sure, Apple had it first, but was it a big advance over a lot of other similar technologies? Nope.
I'll save the flaming of the rest of that rant for the other "macolytes" and just focus on this one.
Firewire is brilliant. The "standard" it replaced (if you can call the myriad forms of SCSI a standard) sucked balls in comparrison. It's powered from the bus, it's intelligent (if I unplug my firewire drive mid-transer for some reason, I get an error message, plug the thing back in, and it WORKS!), and it's easy as hell to use. Just plug it in. No configuring jumpers or dealing with compatibility issues. Not to mention that firewire has almost single handedly contributed to the surge of low budget DV.
Ok, one more point. Apple not only pioneered WiFi in personal computers, they co-invented it with Lucent. How's that for "technical innovation"?
"Boutique" computing aside, there's a lot of innovation that the PC industry owes Apple. Just look at the R&D budgets of PC manufacturers -- Dell spends 1% on R&D, and it's mostly geared towards figuring out how to make computer cases with less solder. It's fine that Dell and even Compaq just want to repackage commodity parts and slap an Intel inside sticker front, but don't claim that the PC industry doesn't owe Apple for pushing the boundaries of innovation.
My other computer is your Windows box
by ct
No, you boot from CD. If you need to build a recovery boot disk, you burn an El Torito CD-R. Learn about it here. There are some great web tutorials on how to take a floppy image and make a bootable CD-R from them using free (beer) software on either Windows or *nix. USB is for sneakernet purposes, though, not booting. USB and aftermarket floppies are always available. They're just not going to be standard any more.by afidel
Last I checked, Dell's do.by Masem
I pay ~$0.10 per CDR, or $1.00 for a CD-RW. How much are you paying for your floppies? And you say "most drivers can fit on to one floppy"... you can fit ALL your drivers on one CD if you burn at once, or burn one-at-a-time about a dozen times (1MB for the driver + 50MB overhead per session). And if you're using CD-RW, this is a total nonissue. Either way, I don't see why this is worse than a floppy.Well, it's the almost perfect media. The perfect media would be just like that, except 451 times as large.
Do you have any idea what the margins are on a PC? OEMs like Dell literally agonize over pennies, I've watched it.by The Bungi
CDRs are now standard, on the front of the case no less.
What's UDF got to do with it? WinXP has CD-R(W) support built in, which masters Joliet CDs that can be read on Win95. And I know Dell includes the rest of Roxio's solution.
by Auckerman
Ditto for XP using the recovery CD. And note that in the scenario you described, it wasn't "from the OS" on the PC, because it was a new PC in pieces (try building a Mac from pieces and see how the experience compares!).
by BWJones
The PC world in general has to wait much longer and be much more careful about dropping legacy support. The expectations and market are just different. This was being pushed by MS when I started working there in '97, and the market is just now ready for it (apparantly).
--dan
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Actually, this is the second time Dell has tried to do away with the floppy. The first time was back in December of 1999, with their floppy-less WebPC-- their "me too" attempt at creating an iMac (though it was not an all-in-one form factor). It was a miserable failure, I don't think it lasted very long into 2000 before Dell pulled the plug on it.
Here is a blurb from the WebPC FAQ that used to be on their site:
"Does webpc include a floppy drive?"
"Good question.
First, every Dell webpc comes with either a CD-ROM or a DVD-ROM drive, both of which are faster, more efficient, and can store a lot more storage than floppy drives.
And, since webpc allows you to e-mail important files to other people via the Internet quickly, why transfer files using a floppy drive?
Without a floppy drive, the webpc is smaller and frees up space for more cool features. However, if you'd still like a floppy drive, and optional, external 120 MB floppy storage drive is available."
~Philly
1) It's the size stupid, when it's not large enough to hold the DOS help file!
2) Dell and other users finally realized that Microsoft is NOT going to let them make their own boot disk, have XP?, just try!
3) Dell needs the space to power Intels CPU, while Microsoft OS drains every milliamp of current with XP hard drive memory paging and other intersting OS background task.
My real comment is why it takes the PC world soooo long on things that are sooooo obvious. Next Dell will add slot load CD/DVD/RW/DVD-RW-R drives, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g, Bluetooth connectivity, all without pulling your arm out of socket.......No really this story is silly.
Barry
.....Don't Get Mad, Don't Get Even, Up The Ante.....
Legacy technology in general:
Rather than tying up modern systems with legacy technology such as floppy drives and Serial, PS/2, and Parallel Ports, I think it's good that OEMs like DELL are making them non-standard. Odds are, if you need those ports/drives, you will buy the appropriate expansion card/drive to add the ports/drives to your system.
USB:
Modern commercial OSes like MacOS X and Windows XP have no problems with modern USB devices, thanks to better driver signing and more experience on the part of hardware makers with learning all the inner workings USB's specs (both 1.0 and 2.0). It took a while for USB to mature, and it will continue to do so.
Odds are, if you're experiencing a problem with USB, it's either the device or your OS is not modern enough.
Floppy Drives:
No Windows XP user needs a boot floppy when they can easily boot with their XP CD-ROM and run diagnostics, etc. from the Recovery Console.
Even the MacOS X CD has bootable recovery utilities on it.
All I use my floppy drive for is for the rare time I get paranoid enough to update my machine's ERD. But usually when my system volume goes bad, I just reinstall the OS from scratch.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I've still got one running in my dads old win98 machine. He has no idea why its "different", he uses floppys all the time, while I use the 120meg disks to backup his work once and a while.
It WAS slow for large files, Imation released a firmware fix for this, which was only available if you bought new 120 disks for it, never did get them myself.
If only the drive was a little cheaper..... who knows.....
So keep an old laptop around for when you need a serial port. It's not like you need that 2.5GHz P4 processor and 1GB memory to run DOS.
The floppy drive is quite possibly the one component inside a computer that most users trust the most.
They've been around for many a year, and imho, many people would be reluctant to see them go - three months ago I wired my mum's computer onto Tim-Net (my home network and information control system) and she still believes in sneakernet as opposed to drag and drop through shared directories.
It's a real pity that LS-120 drives never caught on. These drives could read floppy disks (Unlike ZIP) in addition to their own 120 MB magneto-optical disks.
You know what I want? Cheap, reliable 8 MB disks. I don't need any more than that to carry my work and class documents on. Most of the hype today is on cramming as much information onto the smallest space possible and then charging $40+ *PER CARD*. Disks that pop in and out quickly, won't scratch, that will fit in a pocket and cost 50 cents to replace. It could be done and I believe that there is a large market for it. The people with the patents and the money to do it, however, don't seem to have the vision.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I don't want anybody accessing my floppy drive except me. You're talking crazy talk. You're crazy!
Of course, I wouldn't buy a Dell anyway. They are badly overpriced. At least once a year at work we get an offer for "a great deal from Dell, at the company rate," that's still way over market value for an equivalent machine, same components, from any other reputable manufacturer.
And I've heard the "but the support!" line, too - that doesn't wash. If you know nothing about computers and need help making it work at all, OK. Pay the money. But if you think you need to pay Dell prices in order to have hardware support, then the hardware had better fail a lot. In which case you should choose a different brand.
Here's a fine example: our (big, major, worldwide) company has a contract with Dell. Lots and lots of money for Dell. A 20 gig drive (where did they even find drives that small in 2002?) went bad within 6 months of installation; Dell didn't want to believe it, and our IT department (or at least Lt. Nimrod, the MSCE dingus) said "it's probably just a software problem." OK; so MSCE school teaches you that "no boot device" is a software problem. In an indirect way, I suppose; the hard disk failed, so the BIOS could not find the boot software; yep, that's sort of a software problem. Can't find the freakin' software! That's why I call him Nimrod. Couldn't even script his way out of a paper bag, and the bugger ain't smart enough to carry a knife either. Prepubescent scum.
So Dell and Nimrod insisted that we run ScanDisk. We did this several times over the span of one and a half weeks; every time it took hours, finding countless lost fragments and bad sectors. We lost over a thousand dollars of one man's work (in man-hours; data corrupted when the disk crashed without warning), we fell behind schedule - on a government contract, mind you - all for a measly 20 gig hard drive that must have been worth less than $50 US. Finally, Dell agreed to replace it, but only AFTER we sent the DEAD DRIVE to them!
At knifepoint, Nimrod agreed to take a new 40 gig drive from one of the dozens that had been sitting unused on pallets this whole time, and put it in my employee's machine so we could get on with supplying our government with the things it needs.
Oh, how I hate self-important Nimrods and the companies they let badger them. Obviously, I feel somewhat differently about being the badger. Rrrrr.
The nice thing about the Nimrods is, if you see them in person, there is the potential for intimidation. You can forget that with Dell Hell. This is not Nice Mike Dell in his dorm room anymore.
Oh yes, that service. Well worth the extra $$$$$.
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." -- Robert Heinlein