Is it time to abandon floppy disks?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I love me my floppy drive. I can go to Starbucks and write for three hours, save it to floppy, take it home, and pop it into my desktop.

Of course, I could do the same thing by hooking the laptop to the network, but that means getting out the laptop, putting in the ethernet card, digging the cable out from behind the desk, powering up the laptop…

The floppy is much, much easier.

A CD won’t do the trick for me, because I’m revising files every day. I don’t need a foot-high stack of CDs each with a day’s worth of writing on them–I need a quick and easy way to transfer that day’s worth of work onto my main machine, for backup and for working with at home. A re-writeable CD might do the trick, I guess–if I had machines that could use CD’s like floppies I’d be more than happy to let the floppy go. But I don’t have machines that can do that, so I’ll keep my floppy, thank you very much.

Sure, my laptop can hook into the network–after I put the ethernet card in

42

A USB flash memory is ideal for your purpose. It’s faster, more compact, more reliable and has much larger capacity.

43

Well, for one thing, you would be abble to fit about 400 DVD’s in the same space as those 200 VHS tapes. Even more, if you didn’t use original packaging. Plus, you’d never have to rewind anything. Fast-forwarding would take about 1/10 as long, too. Not only that, but if for some reason you want to transport your DVDs, they are not harmed by getting wet or electical disturbances.

I didn’t use to believe in DVDs either, but it has very real advantages over magnetic tape as a medium. Now I am a convert, preaching the gospel. :smiley:

End of hijack.

44

Or wireless networking. I can’t imagine using a laptop ever again without wireless access. I have AirPort throughout my room at my frat, and now in the apartment I’m moving into. Need to transfer data from my iBook to my iMac? No need for wires, CD-Rs or floppy disks (which I haven’t actually missed on any of my modern Macs).

45

Well, I don’t need a lot of capacity–we’re talking RTF files, and not huge ones. My first laptop (a creaky antique Mr. Cameron picked up on ebay) would freeze up if I opened more than one document, or if I opened a file more than, say 10K words, so I had to divide the thing into chapters. So the files I’m transferring are quite small. Now I’ve got a new one (new to me, anyway) and it could probably handle the whole ms at once, but I still have the habit of using small files.

And my USB ports on my desktop are in the back–so I’d be digging around to slot the thing in and out.

Now, it might be really convenient if it were like the kids’ computer which has the ports in the front, probably for just such a use, and Mr. Cameron has been itching to mess with my machine, and he’s been complaining about my still using Win95 (even though it doesn’t affect him in the least) so who knows what kind of hardware I’ll have a month from now.

But for now, the floppy still works just fine, so I’m not going to spend money on new equipment that does what mine already does.

46

Here’s another example of how a floppy comes in handy:

Traveling in Ireland. No Internet access (no phone jacks even) in most of the places I stayed. Lots of pictures I wanted to email home - too large (1.5 - 2 MB each) and on memory sticks (try to find an Internet Café that will allow you to install software for picture transfers).

I transferred my pictures to my laptop, resized them (with Irfanview), put them on a floppy, went to Internet Cafés to email pictures home. All the Internet Cafés I visited had floppy drives on their computers. I could have burned them onto CD-R, but for less than 200k of pictures every few days (some of my freinds and family still have dial up, so I made them small), the reusable floppy was my hero. I didn’t want to chance a CD-RW, sometimes they can’t be read on all machines.

47

I was going to say that floppies are “long overdue” for death, but I after reading some of the stuff in this thread and thinking a bit, I think I will just say that they’re a technology that needs to be killed, but we don’t have the killers yet.

Disadvantages of floppies are their pathetic capacity (remedied by zipdisks, but not everyone has a zipdrive…), susceptability to magnetic corruption (inherent, no fixing this) and general fragility.

Advantages are cheapness (still cheaper than CD-ROMs, alas!) and universality. Hopefully as everyone starts to have CD-R drives and CD-Rs come down in price until they’re as cheap or cheaper than floppies, we’ll see floppies croak completely.

However, CD-ROMs still have similiar problems to floppies. They’re still fairly fragile, you throw away money every time you burn one, and they still degrade over time - though it’s a longer time than floppies or magnetic tapes. They are also becoming too small in capacity, with some modern apps clocking in at a gig plus.
I think the long-term solution(s) are:

A) Good, highly compatable, fast wireless networking. This will eilminate “sneaker-net” for people close to each other. (Where “close” is defined as reasonable walking distances.)

802.11(g) isn’t going to completely do it, since it’s not here yet and probably won’t be universally compatable anyway. But it’s getting close. The data transfer speed is becoming adequate, which was the big failing of prior 802.11 variants.
B) Ubiquitious, easily accessable network connections and abundant and cheap on-network storage.

Ubiquitious and easily accessable network connections are becoming reality fairly quickly with many coffee shops installing wireless networking gear that just about anyone can link up to. Way cool.

Abundant and cheap on-network storage is still a ways off. Colocation remains quite expensive. But it’s a necessary element for people to be able to exchange large volumes of data regardless of how far apart they are, and for people to store their own data on the network and thus have access to it anywhere there’s a net connection.
If we can satisfy both A and B we can kiss floppies and indeed probably CD-ROMs goodbye permanantly, except perhaps as backup media. Though I am making this sound a lot easier than it is - think about the security implications of having your top secret corporate data accessable from anywhere on the planet with a net connection, and having it transmitted across the air - possibly with highly substandard enryption, like the 802.11(b) WEP debacle.

-Ben

48

I disagree. Apple systems have been selling and working well for five years now without floppy drives.

The immediate answer to the floppy conundrum is CD-R and CD-RW technology. Unless you buy a low-end system, in which case you deserve low-end storage options, you’re gonna get a computer with a CD-RW drive.

CD-RW media have none of the drawbacks of floppies, and have 465 times the capacity.

CompUSA.com lists 100 floppy disks for $39.99. That’s $0.40 a disk, or 3.6 MB per dollar.

For $31.99 you can get 50 CD-RW discs. Sure, that’s 50% again the cost per disc, but you’re getting over a gigabyte of storage per dollar.

There’s no valid reason, aside from the need to buy the lowest-end system imaginable, for someone to buy a system without a CD-RW drive today. If you have a CD-RW drive, there is absolutely no need for a floppy disk drive.

CD-Rs and CD-RWs are far cheaper than floppy disks when you consider capacity.

Hardly. CDs are far more durable than floppy disks, and not susceptible to magnetic erasure. CD-RW discs can be rewritten hundreds of time.

Not true. 802.11b is plenty fast for most domestic usage and 802.11g is compatible with it, and much faster. 802.11a is faster still, but has poor range and low compatibility.

49

It was time to ditch the floppy five years ago.

Leave it to Dell to procrastinate for so long. :wink:

50

To no big surprise to those who know me, I think ditching the floppy would be stupid, mainly because there’s no good reason to do so. It’s not like it bothers anyone who doesn’t want to use it.

[hijack]
Has anyone else noticed that floppy-disks fail much more often than they used to? Back in 1996 I used floppy-disks all the time, and they always worked flawlessly. Nowadays, whenever I need a floppy-disk, I have to go through a big stack of floppies to find one that allows itself to be read.
[/hijack]

51

In order to get costs down, the quality of floppy disks has dropped. The mylar (?) used is thinner now. The plastic is thinner, providing less shielding. The securing flap on the insertion end is now typically cheap plastic and not metal. All of this makes the disks more susceptible to wearing out, tearing, breaking, and erasure.

Also, the quality, in general, of the parts in a lot of computers has gone down – particularly Dells, from my experience – which leads to cheaper floppy drives that won’t read disks as well or treat them as gently. Which all contribute to floppy failure.

52

DELL Corp arenlt dummies. The writing is on the wall.

Floppies will continue to be used in situations where there is a large installed base of floppy drives and where system can only be booted or flashed via floppy. These scenarios are typically going to be in older commercial or institutional settings. Business is often way behind the hardware curve, because of the investments in existing hardwar3e and the high cost to change.

Eventually floppies will go the way of the 5.25 disk and will die away to the point that market share is negligible, but this will take at least another 3-4 years or so.

Floppies are so flakey and relatively unreliable compared to other storage media that any move any from them is a good thing. USB flash readers will replace floppies and the cost of flash modules is so low at this point that 16 meg cards can be had for less than 10 bucks each and I believe that the price of flash cards will continue to drop to the point that they are only a dollar or two each. I predict virtually all new PC’s a year from now will be shipping sans floppy drive unless the customer specs it as a requirement.

53

Currently it would be impossible for me to work w/o the diskette. The variety of machines, some virtual antiques, that I come across in a day and the wildly varying reliability of their network connections (those that have one!), virtually mandates that I have an easily portable medium in which I can edit on-the-spot several times over, and that will work the same ANYWHERE with ANY software.

Besides, a CD-R may be 50 cents for 600MB, while the 3.5 is 30 cents for 1.4MB… but if what I NEED to save is 1MB I will have to fight vicious bean-counters at invoicing time if I use an entire CD-R for that and “waste” 599MB (the same vicious bean-counters that result in the near-antique status of the network). And don’t tell me the vicious bean-counters will be taken care of by the market. 2/3 of my contracts are with government or government-affiliated offices, immune to the market.
That said, yes, the quality of the 3.5s has gone downhill fast.

Look, gimme removable media with the price-per-disk of a CD-R of floppy, the carrying capacity of a Zip or CD-R, the rewritability of a Zip or 3.5 floppy, and that works universally on any machine, directly from the Win or Mac or Linux file manager w/o any proprietary 3d-party software. Too much to ask?

54

JRD, that’s the CD-RW. A properly formatted CD-RW can be read in Mac or Windows (and Linux, I would presume), is completely rewritable, and has massive storage. It’s price-per-capacity is far better than a floppy, as is its durability, etc.

And as for universiality, you mentioned Macs in your list… but since most Mac users don’t have floppy disk drives, how is that a point in the favor of those repugnant little hunks of plastic?

55

One use for floppies that I don’t see mentioned here is rescuing a sick PC - I’m not talking a Windows boot disc, but rather the BIOS rescue routine. Some mobos only have enough wherewithal to look at a floppy drive when they’re messed up, and the floppy is where they’ll find the manufacturer’s re-initialization code.

So, if you’re into overclocking and otherwise tweaking BIOS settings, be sure you have a floppy drive and the BIOS repair code diskette on hand - just in case. :smiley:

56

The death of floppies would be very hard on people like me.

I have a computer system which satisfies my needs entirely.

My one at home is pretty old and slow, but it has what I need - Word and Excel, for writing papers - and a floppy drive for saving my work. It does NOT have Internet or a printer. I do not need either of these things because of the second part of my system:

My computer at work has Internet and a printer. My essays are saved (at home) on the floppy, and brought here to print out.

Works perfectly.

Now, why should I upgrade to a more expensive home computer that I DO NOT NEED (unless they make some remarkable, can’t-live-without changes to Word, which I really doubt will happen - how much can you ‘improve’ a word processor? My tasks will not become more complex) just because some people don’t think floppies have a purpose any more?

I do not know much about these other options for storing and moving data, but honestly, why should I? The system I’ve got works very well. The end of floppies would make my home computer useless for my purposes. What did I do to deserve that?

I am not a person who is wary of new technology. I just don’t see why I should be so inconvenienced by new technology that I have no use for.

57

Hey, I AM rooting for such a time as there is a CD-RW drive on every single damn computer I encounter out there, where the writing part works seamlessly from within the apps (remember: need to ALWAYS able to rewrite no matter what machine I sit at). Until such time, it’s not that I want but that I need the diskette. I have computers at one government office I contract for that don’t even have CDROM drives!!! (all SW installation is done from the network, when/if it’s up) whose outside connection for e-mail is down as often as it’s up.

(BTW there seems to be an underlying assumption in many computer HW/SW threads that the entire universe upgrades every 2 years no matter what it takes and anyone not doing so is committing some sort of unnatural act. Hey, some of us don’t make the purchasing decisions, remember the bean-counters?)

**

You haven’t been to some of the places I’ve worked for in the last year or so… it’s not a pretty picture. Heck, at one of these offices every iMac/eMac/G4 has an external 3.5 drive hooked up.