Why haven’t standard 3.5" floppy disks advanced any? We are still stuck with the crappy 1.44 MB load capacity. Everything else computer-related seems to advance faster than one can keep track of, except floppies. Surely there must be a way to make standard 3.5" floppies have a greater storage capacity.
I know there are zip drives & disks, CD burners, etc.
I speculate that CD burners are probably going to “take over” completely in the near future. Zip stuff is too costly. CD-RW’s are a dime a dozen, compared to zips. Will the standard 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy become obsolete soon? (if it is not already)
About 10 years ago, maybe not quite, 2.88 MB floppy disks became available. They are identifiable by the number “2.88” on the eject button of the drive and were quite common on IBM PCs for a while.
They never caught on because:
[list=“a”][li]File sizes were increasing more rapidly than the relatively minor increase in storage allowed, this being the beginning of the multimedia revolution.[/li][li]Hard drive sizes began increasing rapidly about that time, decreasing the necessity for most people to store their files on floppy disk. Before this time, it was not unusual for users to store just their programs on the hard drive and keep all their data on floppy disk.[/li][li]CD-ROM disks became readily available for distribution of software and offered vastly greater storage capacity at much lower cost, meaning that software manufacturers had a huge incentive to distribute on CD rather than floppy. The last version of MS Office that I can remember being distributed on floppy, for instance, was version 4.2, circa 1994.[/list][/li]Hope this helps.
And who can forget (or should that be who can remember) the 120 Mb SuperDisk that was about the size of a 3.5" floppy and had drives that could read both types of disks.
I’m still waiting for data crystals. Those just look cool.
The only reason that 1.44 mb floppies are around at all is that this is just about the only common link among (almost) all PC’s. It has a relatively tiny capacity but it can still be useful as an emergency start-up option or to take a Word document to another computer across the computer lab. That is all there is to it. It would be great if a disk with a higher capacity were standard but it isn’t, so we have this little 3.5 inch disk to serve as a common link across computers in the absence of other options.
Eight years ago I was at CeBIT in Hannover. There Sony showed a MiniDisc reader for PC. It would put about 100Mb on a 2.5" disc, at the time when people were just beginning to realize that 1.44Mb wasn’t going to last forever.
Sony must have made one of the biggest misstakes in marketing ever, by not pushing their new technology harder. It was just the right timing, but for some reason it never made it out to the market. (The one unit I saw was in a glass case, and I’d guess it was just a mock-up.)
Right now I’m pretty happy with the current situation. If I need to transfer a file, I just ftp or e-mail it - or burn a CD. I only use floppies for booting, and exchanging data with non-networked machines, such as oscilloscopes - but Sony could have cornered the market for five-six years if they had managed to get the MiniDisc accepted as a standard for portable storage.
I think they are readying the next generation of SuperDisk which has twice the capacity.
As for the MD, it wasn’t going to fly anyway since there were other removable media available at the time, including Iomega and Sequest (remember them?).
Just a note, by the way, there is not, and never was, such a thing as a 1.44 MB 3.5 inch disk. The size of a standard disk is 1440 KB, which (since computer Ks are 1024, not 1000) is 1.41 MB. If you’d rather use base 10 thousands, then it’s 1.47 MB. Only if you use one base 10 thousand and one base 2 thousand can you get 1.44 .
The 1.4 floppies are nice for putting a file on and giving it to someone. That’s all there are good for. If you have more files than will fit on the floppy, you put them on a CD.
You can get small storage devices like the IBM microdrive up to 1GB, and compact flash cards from 8 MB to 512 MB. But even the compact flash cards cost enough that you prefer not to give them away since a CD is much cheaper.
In any event, I find I have to be super careful when using a floppy from my shrinking supply. Their minimum age is at least five years (dating back to the last time I actually purchased diskettes) and I routinely slow-format them first to check for damage. There have been times I’ve gone through and discarded six disks before I found one I could trust.
With CD-R disks falling below 75¢ and lower, and the CD drives having become a standard in all new machines, I don’t see the humble floppy hanging on much longer. The floppy-less iMac was a bold step, even if it did spark a lot of whining.
I have a Sony Mavica digital camera (model FD-7) which uses floppy disks. If it weren’t for having this I probably would hardly ever use my floppy drive.
I have the exact same concern with Zips: sure, they have more capacity than floppies, and the drag-and-drop ability is nice, but they also have pretty much the same drawbacks (the disks have a tendency to die randomly, although they are nowhere near as volatile as 3.5" floppies). It also doesn’t help that the disks and the drives are damn expensive and Iomega has a monopoly on the format–no competition means higher price, lower quality hardware and bad tech support (“Your drive broke? Too bad, buy another…”).
If you want drag and drop and portability, you’re better off getting one of the luggable usb hard drives. Bigger capacity and faster, too.
Most people would characterize my 7100 as obsolete, even though with its 300 MHz G3 accelerator it is still doing office duty as a viable auxiliary machine. It has an actual Floppy Drive in it, and it still works.
Back when the 7100 was new (circa 1995), I picked up a second-hand DaynaFile drive, so I’d be able to read any 5.25" floppies that my PC using friends with older PCs might bring me.
The computer that essentially replaced the 7100 was my WallStreet PowerBook, circa mid-1999. Apple had just stopped automatically including floppy drive modules with new PowerBooks, and I figured I’d buy one later on, because you know someone will have data on a floppy you need to read sooner or later.
Well, in my experience the 3.5" floppy disk as of 1999 was approximately as obsolete as the 5.25" floppy was in 1995.
Of course it is nice to have one. If I did not have my 7100 still ticking away, I’d probably get a PowerBook floppy module. And I still have the DaynaFile in the closet, along with my SyQuest drive and my LocalTalk networking dongle, and a big spool of thin coaxial ethernet cable and terminators in case I need to hook up a thin coax network…cuz you never know!
(Macs will boot from damn near anything. I almost got a Mac to boot from a backup tape drive once, at least as far as the smiling Mac icon and the beginning of the “Starting Up” dialog screen, but it was taking forever and eventually seemed to hang so I gave up and did a reboot).
They probably are on a PC if they are IDE, SCSI, or ATA bus Zip disks; don’t know about USB, probably not for parallel Zips. I suspect you can switch the bootup device in your BIOS and as long as “E” (or “F” or whatever) is a bootable logical bus architecture, the computer won’t care if the device itself is a CDROM, a regular hard disk, a Zip, or whatever.
The next storage standard that takes over, at least I hope, will be CD-MRW, or Mt. Rainier format. Same disc as a normal CD-RW, but the disc acts like a floppy, ie you can drag and drop, burn, erase, and modify files at will. None of this “put together the 700MB you want to burn, then burn it while praying for nothing to happen” crap. This overcomes the biggest disadvantage of CD-RWs to date, and since the media is already at commodity prices, I think it has a good shot at taking off. The only issue is the price of the drives, but I’m sure when it becomes more popular you’ll be able to find slower speed drives for free. New burners should support CD-MRW, so it should become a silent standard fairly quickly.
The only reason I still use floppies is to transfer files to/from school. My biggest beef, even more than reliability, is how SLOW they are. Noisy buggers too.
The most I have paid for CDR blanks in the past year was 25 cents each, and that included the jewel case (from Global, quan 300). Officemax.com just had a sale, bulk 32x for $7.00/100 after rebate!