Jan 30
If you have not already done so.
But floppies hold only 1.44mb of data – now little more than a single song, one high resolution picture or a few dozen word-only documents.
Instead, memory cards, CD/DVDs and memory sticks can hold up to 1,000 times as much data.
Floppy power!
Oh floppy disks, how will i miss using you as friezbees
Damn, I fazed those out years ago. I kept trying to get my friends to do the same, but they said it was still a good and cheap form of storage even though CD’s, DVD’s. and flash drives are so cheap right now. Almost like still having VHS or cassettes in my opinion.
It’s been years since I’ve used a floppy, but when I did I never stored much on them beyond Word documents. But these days I back-up and transport such documents, not on CDs or flash drives, but via my gmail account.
I have used a floppy many times recently for boot disks. I dont think I will stop using them for a while. They come in pretty handy
the floppy shall never die!
Apparently since this is shocking news I’m gonna have to make a few more revelations:
Time to chuck your 8-tracks, zip discs, mini-discs, and those little tapes from your telephone answering machines.
I know this is gonna be tough for most of us who rely on these in our every day lives, but I’m sure we’ll pull through.
Unfortunately Floppy Disks are still needed for many people.
Have a SATA Hard Drive in your PC? Try installing Windows XP on it without a floppy drive. Can’t be done.
I’d love to take the drive out of my PC, but if I’m still using XP (not switching to Vista any time soon) I need the stupid thing still.
Your a bit… slow?
UnderHero5:
I’m right there with you. I seem to find myself doing a clean install every 6 months or so to keep the system in ship-shape. Would be nice to not have to keep that floppy lying around just for that (it’s all alone on my shelf with the CDs and DVDs).
Been looking into slipstreaming my XP install disk with all the new updates for then next time I install. I”m pretty sure it’s possible to add those pesky SATA drivers to it as well.
I’m with UnderHero and IronYam as well.
For BIOS updates and Windows XP SATA driver installs, a floppy can’t be beat. Also good for bootdisks as well.
I’m not quite ready to toss my 3.5″ floppy just yet.
But I won’t install another 5.25″ floppy though….
UnderHero5,
What are you talking about. I install XP on sata drives all the time without a floppy drive even on the PC. I also do my bios updates from within the os (on certain motherboards).
I wish I could throw my floppies out, but I can’t. Every now and then, I need to ghost a drive, and that means booting an OS that runs MS-DOS applications, doesn’t write to the HDD, but also gives me networking / DHCP capabilities. I need to put those ghost images somewhere, afterall. I’ve found boot disk utilities that have networking capabilities, but I need the floppies to boot off of.
Even creating a boot CD requires a floppy. Every utility that I’ve ever seen to create a boot CD required me to have a floppy drive, and required a pre-made boot floppy in the drive for it to copy the image from. I’ve found utilities to create and modify floppy images, but that doesn’t help when creating a boot CD. I still need to put that floppy image on a floppy disk for the boot CD creation utility to read from. It’s a major pain in the butt.
Then there are those times I need to zero out a HDD. Whenever my firm gets rid of old PCs, I need to make sure there is no data on the drives, which means zeroing it out. I can’t do that with anything except a boot floppy. Of course, I could create a bootable CD, but then I have the same problem that I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Now, if my fellow computer scientists would just create some nice utilities to make bootable CDs without needing floppy disks, then I would be as happy as can be. Until that time, I’ll keep hording my floppies, and keeping around a couple ancient PCs with floppy drives on them.
Underhero5, I have a SATA HDD, and have installed XP twice, and have never used a floppy. You know you can boot from CD right? Heck, you can even boot from USB devices on some systems (mine can).
I’m going to go ahead and guess that UnderHero5 was talking about installing RAID drivers for SATA drives at XP install, and not just installing XP straight to a SATA drive.
Zero_Out: There are a lot of great utilities out there with pre-made bootable CD images. I like DBAN for doing hard drive wipes. But you’re right, it’s time for a bootable CD creation utility that doesn’t requite floppies. However, a generic CD boot image file can be copied off of a bootable CD, stored as a file, and added to another ISO image with an ISO editor.
That would be cool to have a 5.25 drive that was a front feeding CD drive. Retro look with modern day utility.
My computer has a floppy drive. It is so dirty and gross due to underuse that even if I did use floppies, I would be loathe to put on in that disgusting hole (the A drive, get your mind out of the gutter).
My mom still keeps them around from when we had a 386… well, I say had, but we still have it. It’s just not hooked up anymore. Kinda tempting to hook it up to play all those old DOS games I loved.