Slashdot Mirror
The Death of the Floppy Disk
vook writes "Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life. "
1. I can install 3rd party disk drivers during a Windows install from a CD or USB device (right now you can only do that with a floppy) 2. EVERY BIOS supports booting from a USB key device 3. USB keys universally work across all platforms and OS's. Some do already, but some don't and rely on the OS to have builtin drivers already. 4. ALL OEMs stop relying on floppies for ANYTHING (Dell for example). Once all these come to pass, we can safely throw away our floppies and be fine. Until then, floppies will cling to life by a thin thread for admins, hackers, and power users, even though none of them wish to use floppies. Normal users have no need for floppies these days, so this won't affect them much.
Space for rent, inquire within
I already have it, and for quite some time. It's a MSI motherboard with AMI BIOS. I'm pretty sure that all modern BIOSes have this option.
Dells without floppy drives can boot from USB, either USB floppy ( ironically enough,) or USB dongle, or USB external hard drive (such as Lacie)
I would assume any OEM that was scrapping floppy support would have a BIOS that could handle USB boot.
The sooner slow, unreliable, huge 3.5 inch floppies are completely scrapped the better.
Post USB they have become an archiac format long past their use by date.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
1. You just can't put anything interesting on them anymore. I used to be able to copy Word files or graphics files to a floppy and carry them back and forth to work on them. Most of the Word files (something more interesting than a 1-page letter) I work with lately are bigger than a floppy! Many of the graphics I work with are too. You simply need something bigger than a floppy nowadays.
2. Bootable CDs are filling the niche for system recovery. Used to be I always had a boot floppy with me to recover systems. Now I carry a bootable credit card CD with a lot more tools on it.
3. Floppy quality is going down. The last box of floppies that I bought, I threw away about 30%! Not only that, I've noticed that they don't seem to hold files like they used to. I write a file on floppy, check it two weeks later and the file is unreadable. I format the floppy and come up with 200k of bad sectors when previously there were none.
and its been in macs since the blue g3 towers. its those subtle things that apple does that few people know about, but can make the user experience sublime (like auto-switching ethernet ports, so you never need a crossover cable). Target mode is an amazing tool for recovering a busted ass system (or data theft, for that matter), and open firmware (letting you boot up from an ipod, external firewire drive, blah blah blah) makes it even cooler.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
I haven't had a floppy in any of my systems for several years now, but every once in a while it comes back to bite me in the ass.
Windows XP, installs, for instance, STILL have to laod driver extras (RAID, SCSI, etc) from a floppy at boot -- even if the computer in question doesn't have one.
Companies such as Dell often package their driver and BIOS releases only onto floppy disk images; it's damn near impossible to pull out these files and install them from the hard drive or CD. That drives me nuts, but it happens.
So I keep a couple of old drives, cables and all, hanging around in a box, and I plug 'em in to the desktop systems when needed. Luckily my laptop has never needed one... I'd feel just plain silly going out and buying a USB floppy drive these days.
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
Why? If it gets fried, it's not going to boot anyways.
A BIOS flasher saves the original first. This way if the flash fails, you can attempt again with the original. BIOS is read from flash on boot - after that, it's memory resident. If you misflash a BIOS, you're fine until you hit "reset".
You'd be a fool to flash a BIOS from a bootable CD-ROM.
What about BIOS updates or virus recovery? Can you boot from a USB dongle? That is where floppies (still) come in handy. Unless you have a Mac (which can boot off just about anything with a "System" folder on it). floppies make good quick and dirty boot devices.
Actually most newer computers can boot from USB jump drives, USB drivers, and even old systems and boot from CD. You don't need a Mac either. My WinTel P4 system can boot Zipslack off my 512mb jump drive just fine. Its actually just an option in the bios to enable boot from other devices. My last AMD system had this option too thought I never tested it with USB.
Oh and while no one uses them anymore, you can also boot off zip drives and all those odd little discs too.
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid