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The End of a Floppy Era

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the it-ain't-hard-to-make-jokes dept.

An anonymous reader writes This article is an editorial on the end of the floppy and the rise of more portable, more efficient data storage." Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery. Talk about your long term enterprise data storage. Some of those buggers made it thousands of years!

8 of 786 comments (clear)

  1. Not gone... by ginotech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I still outfit every computer i build with a floppy. Only 10 bucks, and you never know when it'll come in handy.

    1. Re:Not gone... by phasm42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The media is a lot cheaper, and support is near universal.

      --
      "No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
    2. Re:Not gone... by harrkev · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Load the RAID driver on a fresh install of XP. I admit that this is a windows failing, though...

      Floppies are also useful for mobo firmware updates. Creating a bootable CD-Rom just for a firmware update is a bit of a pain. Bootable floppies are very easy.

      --
      "-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
    3. Re:Not gone... by chris_mahan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you want cheap, get a DLT tape (http://www.tapeandmedia.com/Super_DLT_Tape_II_Qua ntum.asp)
      you can store 600gig (encrypted) for $89.95.

      that comes to 0.015 cents per meg, or $0.00015 per meg. Cheaper than hard drives.

      What his point is that you can just hand someone a floppy and say: "enjoy", and not care about getting the floppy back.

      --

      "Piter, too, is dead."

  2. New Format by Antimatter3009 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So what's the new format for booting into DOS to flash my video card BIOS?

  3. Keep the floppy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Advantages of floppies over USB:
    * They can be removed without an unmount procedure.
    * They are essentially free, whereas I need to get my USB drives returned.
    * They don't autorun stuff when inserted.
    * Works with Windows 98 (25% of the desktop market)
    * They are bootable (handy when debugging a computer)
    * Works with DOS (handy when debugging a computer)

    For $10, I'll keep my floppy drive, thank you.

  4. No logical replacement, though by mrRay720 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What have we got in terms of removable media though?

    CD? certainly cheap, and at a guess 50% of computers now have them, but they are BIGGER than what they're replacing. Probably not as durable for day-to-day usage, either. FAIL

    DVD? Well a much better replacement option than CD, were it not for the fact that probably only 10% of comnputers have them. Less durable that CD, with compatability issues still lingering on older equipment. FAIL

    ZIP? Dead. Dead

    USB memory sticks? Probably usable by 95%+ at least. Most are compatible alternative (well the ones using standard mass storage drivers anyway), but there are price issues. The cheapest ones are an order of magnitude or two more expensive than floppys/CDs/DVDs. Higher capacity ones (650MB-4.7GB) are A LOT more expensive than the alternative replacements, CDs and DVDs.

    Portable HD? Great capacity, compatability, capacity/price ratio, but an even higher minimum price than the thumbdrives.

    All other options just have no real benefits over the alternatives listed above and/or have a pathetic tiny market share.

    Why did the industry fail so horribly in coming up with a cheap and easy floppy replacement? Perhaps there's just far less need for it now that so many PCs are connected via the internet or local LAN.

    Is it "Floppy is dead" or "removable mass media is dead"?

  5. Only a partial death by lightyear4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can certainly hear the death knell ringing in the distance, but as with all legacy equipment, the floppy will never quite die. In repairing computers for the past ten or so years, I have been required to use a floppy with, paradoxically, increasing frequency. Boot cds are wonderful, but many times older equipment (the stuff that fails that I'm being asked to troubleshoot) just cannot handle them; some require a floppy to due to the nonexistent bios booting option; others are of great use simply because old software, well written, will never pass away. Surely those of you who do data recovery and forensics have loads of such tools at your disposal?

    Floppies have served us well, and at least some of us will be using them for some time to come.