Floppy Drives: What is your verdict?

[Will Rickards]

The red carpet thread seems to have gone a bit off topic...
To the fate of the floppy drive.
http://www.handruin.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=36

So what is your verdict?
Should it die a quick death in the bit bucket of obscurity?
Should it live on as an invaluable tool when things go awry?
(discuss)

 

[Will Rickards]

My feelings:

Floppy disks are the most unreliable pieces of garbage that ever existed.
They have caused more lost data than I care to think about.
They are so useless because of their ridiculously small capacity.

Most bios programs allow you to boot from the CD drive.
But a bootable CD still has a floppy image as the bootable part!

Some would argue there is no rewritable technology as flexible as the floppy. Yes, flexible enough for me to split it in two!
Some people have had bad experiences with zip drives, but I for one
love them and they have never failed me. I would love to see a drive
like the zip replace the floppy drive.

Death to the floppy!

 

[balding_ape]

As much as I hate floppies and want to see them go, we need them still. There is no more convenient way to deal with some problems. Plus, floppies are _really_ cheap.

I can't stand ZIP drives...I used them at work to back up projects, and at home to transfer files between my computer in my place and my girlfriend's in her apartment. If you drop that disk, you're screwed. Data killed. Maybe I just got cheap disks or something, but it seemed that their tolerance for jarring was terrible. Anyone else have this problem?

Bootable CDs are a good idea...is there anything they can't do that floppies can? Aside from the fact that any administrators out there who have to deal with older hardware (and that's all of you, right? ), floppies might be a necessity.

As much as I want floppies dead (corrupted info on them...grrr...), they need to be here for a while, I guess.

 

[Adcadet]

CD-Rs and CD-RWs should take over the role of floppies. The only question is when.

Re: cost - CD-Rs are rather cheap - about 40 cents when purchased in a spindle of 50; I know you can get them cheaper if you look hard.

Re: ease of ues - the floppy is easier to use, but with CD writing software getting better (i.e.-helpful wizards in Nero), and with CD burners getting faster, I see the CD-R getting easier and easier to use.

Re: reliability - not even comparable. I've had tons of floppies die on me, but I've never had a CD go bad on me. Maybe in 100 years the CDs I'm burning won't be readable, but by then the floppies will be dust.

Re: size - 650 MB (or greater if you like) sure beats the daylights out of 1.44 MB!

Re: speed - last I checked, my CD-Rs could be read much faster even from an older 8X CD-ROM drive than any floppy. Does anybody know how fast a floppy drive can read and transfer data?

Re: install base. Seems every computer still running has a CD-ROM drive, and nearly every PC also had a floppy, so this is a tossup. However, burners are still a bit too uncommon. But it seems more and more burners are being sold every day, bad economy or not.

 

[Pradeep]

I still need a floppy drive to update my BIOS. Now with TigerMP even a 24" floppy cable is not long enough to reach to the top of my cae so it is not connected. But if I ever needed it I could hook it up. Now I notice that with many new computers, my laptop included, the BIOS can be upgraded thru Windows. But while I still have older hardware I need my floppy drive.

 

[jtr1962]

There are times when you need them, especially when working with older hardware that just can't boot to a CD. On most machines, I would say CD-RW is largely taking over the function formerly done by floppies, but until Mt. Rainier compliant hardware is in nearly all machines, the floppy will continue to serve a valuable role. I still always have a floppy drive in all my machines. It is good to know it is there in case of an emergency, and it is still quite useful for transferring things like Word documents and Excel spreadsheets between computers. Considering that a formatted CD-RW disk takes 8-10 seconds to recognize and mount, the floppy can actually be faster for transferring files under a few hundred KB. Of course, for transfers of tens of megabytes(something I do quite often), the floppy is near useless, and CD-RW comes into it's own.

 

[jtr1962]

Does anybody know how fast a floppy drive can read and transfer data?

Best time to read or write an entire disk=35 seconds, or approximately 40KB/sec read/write speed. In CD-ROM terms this is 0.27X

 

[Mercutio]

I curse the floppy drive! I will dance, then spit on its thrice-curst grave. I will do 'The Hustle".

And then there shall be peace across the land.

 

[Fushigi]

As others have said, the floppy really isn't quite ready to die just yet. Until CDs are as convenient / safe as floppies, floppies will still be useful. Needs:

- Direct OS support from all available OSes for random reading & writing.
- Easily idenitifed as a main boot device without entering BIOS. Average users should not ever see a BIOS screen.
- CD-RW drives that are cheap enough that CD-RW is cheaper than FDD + CD.
- Higher drive reliability. Face it, FDDs rarely fail anymore. CD drives fail with a certain frequency. I'm talking drives here, not media.
- Scratch-resistant media.
- Hardware-enabled write protection. Done on the media; not the drive. Media must be switchable between write-enabled and write-protected.

Now, about all I use my FDD for is BIOS flashing. My fiance uses it to exchange files with her job at a hospital where they don't allow Internet email access.

- Fushigi

 

[The JoJo]

Good points Fushigi.

I'm glad when the slow floppy goes away. But that time is not yet, I need floppies maybe once every couple of weeks, and at the moment can't think of solving those situations easily(!) with other means.
The other means would maybe be :installing new hardware, making bootable images, burning them on cds etc....

And now with Linux the boot floppy has saved me from extra work a few times...

Partly on this subject, say that I have a CD with information on it, burned with iso9660+rockridge. This whouls work on all different platforms right? SunOs, HP-UX, AIX, Linux; Tru64 etc.... but no, the HP-UX wont understand it unless you do this and that and then some, while the others read it just like that. Have had some headaches with that, specially with file that have uppercase and lowercase characters...

 

[Tannin]

I said it in the other thread but I'll repeat it here. A floppy drive is like a spare tyre: you hope you don't have to ever use it, but you'd be mad to drive around without one.

PS: obvious bias here - I build and repair PCs for a living. I don't care so much about how nice they are to use, I just want them to be easy to fix. And for that, a floppy drive is essential.

 

[CougTek]

CD-Rs and CD-RWs should take over the role of floppies.

This is my wish too.

 

[Cliptin]

I don't care so much about how nice they are to use, I just want them to be easy to fix.

As far as "nice to use", CD* won't be nice to use until they have read and burn support in bios.
I have a floppy in every machine although one sits in the bottom of the case. I keep them around primarily as protection against elderly hardware.

 

[Will Rickards]

Let's agree that for older hardware floppies are necessary.

But in new PC's especially these ones without legacy ports and such,
why do you really need a floppy and do you guys want them to stick around in those type of PCs?

CD re-writers are much more common now. Heck, even I would have
one if I weren't out of IDE channels. So they are the closest to being
the answer to the replacement of floppy drives.

But what about something different? Take min-discs for example.
This seemed like a great technology to me that didn't take off or is
being adopted only ever so slowly because of a huge CD install base.
Why not try to use them in PCs for transfering files?

Maybe all PCs would come with a USB storage device that could be a bootable device? I've seen these really small USB storage things.

 

[Pradeep]

In the future there will prob be onboard wireless lan (802.11b or whatever) for minimal cost, reducing the need for devices such as floppy drives. Re: Minidisc, I believe the actual storage capacity is about 100-200MB?, and it gets the 70 min playtimes by agressive compression.

I recall Ian Hobday saying that MO drives were quite big in Japan.

 

[adriel]

MD audio is popular in europe and japan.

MD data drives are slow though.

I'm floppyless. Things have gone wrong with the computer before, but there has always been a way to fix things without a floppy.

 

[Prof.Wizard]

DVD+RWs with the new 9.4GB disks are a good alternative to the floppy disk for the near future! 8)

 

[Corvair]

The LS-120 floppy drive is pretty good actually. You can store as much as 120 MB on a medium that fits easily into your top shirt pocket (...if you wear shirts that have pockets) and can ALSO read 720 KB / 1.4 MB floppy discs as well. The LS-120 is not particularly fast compared to Zip drives, but faster than standard floppy drives. The ATAPI (IDE) model is fairly affordable and quite handy with their dual compatibility.

 

[time]

I thought LS-120 was dead or dying?

 

[Tea]

I have sold exactly one LS-120 drive. I've sold maybe 50 Zip drives. Funny thing that, I hate Zip drives with a passion, and rather liked the LS-120. It sat in stock for about 18 months and I eventually managed to flog it off for half what I paid for it.

Just the other week, I had a customer order a new machine. Seeing as he wanted a DDR main board, it wasn't possible to have an ISA slot, and that meant that he couldn't use his external p/port LS-120 drive. PCI LPT2 cards were very dear last time I checked ($80AU before tax), so I thought it might be just as practical to get him an IDE LS-120. Couldn't get hold of one for love nor money. Everyone has parallel and USB LS-120s available, no internals. And the USB ones were a couple of hundred dollars or so.

Then I discovered that the PCI LPT2 cards had dropped to about A$30 ex tax, so we went with one of those instead. Funny that you can't buy an IDE LS-120 any more though.

 

[Mercutio]

Somewhat related subject: How well do USB/serial, USB/parallel and USB/SCSI converters work?

I tried an all-in-one USB-to-legacy-ports adaptor (2 serial, 2 PS/2, 1 parallel, 1 100Mbit ethernet) recently on my laptop and it didn't work at all with my modem or palm cradle, but my laptop wasn't on its approved hardware list, either.

Back on subject:

My idea for the "right" replacement for the floppy is one of the digital camera media. CF or MMC or something. Probably CF. The 8MB cards are going to hold most of your "office-type" files and cost very little ($5 at the corner drugstore), and there's all kinds of scalability in the capacity of storage - 512MB CF cards are out there now, for example, and Microdrives beyond that.

Tough sell, I know, but Sony makes a Memory-stick to floppy adaptor. Something similar could probably be whipped up for "legacy" PCs without CF readers (which aren't that expensive anyway).

They're tiny. Easy to fit in a pocket.

If they get wet, it's not too hard to dry them out without damaging data - I speak from experience here (an oven at around 150 F fixes 'em right up).

One could even make the case that those little solid-state cards are more durable than floppies. All six of the ones I have still work, which is a much higher percentage than the last box of floppy disks I purchased.

 

[time]

How well do USB/serial, USB/parallel and USB/SCSI converters work?

I think it depends ...

I sold a USB to parallel converter to a customer in December, and he had nothing but troubles (corrupt prints, etc, etc). We decided it was faulty and got him to send it back to the supplier. They tested it and it worked fine.

They posted it to me on December 19, and we just received it two days ago ... snail mail lives. I'm not sure I'm game to try it.

I have heard though that many such units are flaky, and that it pays to get the right brand. Don't ask me which brand - they're all Taiwanese backyard outfits anyway.

 

[Tannin]

I've sold three or four USB to serial converters, all to doctors wanting to use their laptops with some kind of medical device that I forget the details of. Cheap, no-name ones from Anyware (nee APCA), one of those cables and assorted odds and ends places. No problems at all. Touch wood.