Why I love Floppy Disks

edited August 2017 in Hardware
Floppies have what we now consider very limited storage capacities, the hgihest I know of being the 2.88 MF-2DD floppes. and the lowest being 160k 8 inch floppies.

Since their capacity is low, they aren't useful for modern day things. However, like many of use, if you use older systems you'll find floppies are your best friend when they and their respective drives work.

The limited capacity isn't that bad considering file sizes back in the day, and the kicker with floppies is that unlike CD's floppies can be easily formatted and reused providing there's no errors.

his of course is a great thing, to be able to reuse, time and time again, and not have to keep on buying CD's which are getting more and more expensive.

Floppies, especially standard 1.44mb ones are pretty cheap, considering a local seller is selling for $0.15 each.

Comments

  • Floppies only stuck around because mass storage on PCs was utter trash. Look at Japan for what could have been - PC-98s (NEC's PC incompatible platform that runs MS-DOS, the standard of Japan until DOS/V systems slowly chipped away at it) very often had SCSI, and MO was the most popular non-floppy removable media there. Standardized, rewriteable, and bootable. The mechanisms and disks were also far more reliable than the popular Western alternative, Zip. (Iomega's only good product was Bernoulli.)

    Alas, the problem was, good luck getting any of this on a PC. SCSI was rare outside of proto-HEDT, parallel was dog slow and required weird drivers and wasn't bootable, and installing an ISA card just for a disk would be a PITA. So this basically condemned the PC to floppy drives until USB mass storage took off. ATAPI was a thing, but non-floppy mediums didn't take off in the west due to the previously mentioned reasons. (I note Macs had SCSI standard, and MO just worked, but they lacked the market share to influence the numbers. Mac SCSI was also slow without DMA.)

    Good riddance to the floppy disk. Slow, little space, unreliable.
  • Actually, MO drives were a tiny part of the total sales of large capacity removable drives. In 1994, all MO drives combined sold a total of less than 500,000 which was about the same as the number of drives from Syquest alone. Note that Syquest was about 75% sales to the US while only 10% of MO sales were in the US. High capacity floppy (Insite and Zip) was a mere 200,000 then but the Zip did have an impressive rampup to sell about 40 million in total*. The world-wide leader was optical. Read-write drives accounted for more than 700,000 while the read only drives numbered 24 million. For comparison, 75 million floppy drives were sold in the same year.

    * The last year (1999) I have records for indicate that Iomega Zip sold 9.5 million units while all the flopticals combined for a mere 3.2 million; CD-ROM and DVD writers sold 6 million; MO accounted for 1.8 million; Castlewood Orb and Iomega Jaz carried the limping rigid disk market to a mere 1.2 million. Normal 3.5" floppy drives were 113 million with another 44,000 5.25" and 8" drives.

    I love the floppy disk drive. There was something very satisfying to the locking clunk of the 8" RX-02.
  • I absolutely hated floppy disks. There was a brief period of time when I rather enjoyed the fact that my entire OS and all of my files fit on a 3.5" floppy disk... but other than that, I hated them. I constantly ran into space issues (and not understanding about the whole MB vs MiB thing led to many frustrating days) and reliability issues. I can't tell you how many times a disk containing very important docs would give me a "This disk is not formatted. Format now?" error. Leaving me scared shitless that I just lost all of my files.

    So yes, good riddance I say. I'll take a flash drive any day.
  • BlueSun wrote:
    I absolutely hated floppy disks. There was a brief period of time when I rather enjoyed the fact that my entire OS and all of my files fit on a 3.5" floppy disk... but other than that, I hated them. I constantly ran into space issues (and not understanding about the whole MB vs MiB thing led to many frustrating days) and reliability issues. I can't tell you how many times a disk containing very important docs would give me a "This disk is not formatted. Format now?" error. Leaving me scared shitless that I just lost all of my files.

    So yes, good riddance I say. I'll take a flash drive any day.

    Try using a flash drive on systems from before 1995 though.

    I'm speaking from the perspective of a person who likes vintage systems.
  • Floppies were okay. I still use them once in a while for older computers. I also have a Sony digital camera that takes floppy disks (at max resolution, 6 pictures per disk). It has a very fast "4x" floppy drive. I wonder if they ever made a drive that fast for PCs...

    I prefer Zip disks over the standard floppy. They're much more reliable, faster, and they store a lot more. Great for transferring data back and forth on old systems, or doing backups.
  • Install Ethernet, or install a SCSI card and attach a CD/MO/ZIP drive, or even serial networking.

    I have no time to baby floppies when using older systems. I'll do the minimum and avoid after that. (Exception: My Mavica.)
  • ATA flash or GTFO. ;)

    That's what I love about old laptops - just grab an adapter and pop in a CF card.
  • Floppies... you either love them or hate them. I remember back in the early days I used DriveSpace to try and expand the capacity of the few floppies I had, from the standard 2.88MB to like a hundred times that. It actually worked but did cause problems, which was to be expected.

    They're pretty much the computer equivalent to the old VHS tapes, one other thing we should all remember ;)
  • ampharos wrote:
    Install Ethernet, or install a SCSI card and attach a CD/MO/ZIP drive, or even serial networking.

    I have no time to baby floppies when using older systems. I'll do the minimum and avoid after that. (Exception: My Mavica.)

    Have you ever tried one of those FlashPath adapters with your Mavica? I see them on eBay once in a while and was wondering how they compare to using regular floppy disks.
  • I don't have one, nor any compatible media for it. Would like to find one though!
  • There are are a lot of 3.5" floppies laying around in my basement, but they aren't of any worth to me or WinWorld (they contain old family pictures and such that have already been moved to more reliable storage mediums) and I am not going to spend the time to sort them or throw them away. So they will rot in my basement until the end of time (or I move, whichever comes first). Who knows if they will still be functioning in 10-15 years? It's that really finite lifespan of floppies that amazes me.

    As for VHS, I have only one functioning tape in my house (the rest have either been discarded, completely ruined by a VCR, or failed to play at all). It's a recorded TV broadcast of a certain old James Bond movie from sometime in 2005. And the tape actually skips the commercials (it was recorded that way by the VCR).
Sign In or Register to comment.