The End of a Floppy Era

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!

Comments

move along....

[Lxy]

Another article declaring the death of the floppy. Haven't we seen these before? Isn't it OBVIOUS that there's better solutions? Duh. Unfortunately for most IT geeks, the floppy will be part of our job for the forseeable future.

In the ideal world, all your PCs that you administer will boot off that fancy USB keychain. Software that insists on doing a media check no longer exists, and the floppy disk is merely a wall decoration.

In a real IT environment, you're ineveitably stuck with machines that are accesible ONLY by floppy. Want to boot that PII machine? Better find a floppy. I set up several HPaq laptops about a year ago. You'd think by now they'd have USB booting working, right? NOPE. The BIOS was set to boot off USB, I popped in my bootable flash drive, and... nothing. I booted a desktop to be sure, yes, this flash drive is bootable. I never pursued it because I had several workarounds (one being the removable floppy drive) but it goes to show that this bane of technology known as the floppy disk will be around for quite some time.

Last month I received a software package distributed on DVD. A forward thinking company, right? Then what's this floppy disk for? That's right, they have a floppy that's needed to install the software. It uses strategically placed bad sectors to verify that the floppy disk is genuine and lets you install the software. Good thing this brand new Dell PC still has a floppy drive, or I couldn't install it.

Sorry folks, the floppy may have outlived its usefulness in the user realm but in the IT realm, we get to hang on to them for quite awhile.

I realise I couldn't remember if I had a drive

[tod_miller]

And then I realised I do not have one at work (dell) or at home (home made).

If I need to read off a floppy, I do have a laptop with a usb floppy (old). But who gives me disks? if someone tries to give me a disk, I say, just email me the bloody thing, 1.4 mb uncompressed files, or zip them up (or tar them ffs).

Network/Email killed the floppy more than usb drives. I use usb increasingly for files that won't fit on CD.

hardly surprising, but...

[CAIMLAS]

In a world where a single Word document can take up 700Kb (ie, half a floppy disk) without being more than a couple pages or having graphics, probably close to 1/2 of all floppy disks are bad out of the box and even more die after only a couple uses, and there's almost ubiquitous networks and Internet access, why is this surprising?

The fact that other media is finding a niche is, I think, only correlary. A box of 10 floppies costs, what, $10 still at Best Buy? Do they even sell floppies at Best Buy anymore? This transition would've occurred much sooner if companies would've stopped selling flawed and essentially lemon disks years ago, when the technology allowed from the transition away from such things.

Sometime around the year 1999 would've been a good time to simply stop providing them in a PC (and including a 16Mb USB CF card in its stead, with easy-access USB ports on the front). The cost to the manufaturer would've been defrayed in both increased sales ("Ohh, free technology!") and having to not spend $10 or so per machine for the next 4 (5? are they still installing floppy drives in new PCs?) years.

Aside from a couple disks I've got floating around which I use as bookmarks for magazines and books I'm reading, I've not seen a floppy actually being used as such in years.