Are Floppy Drives Obsolete?

[BFG10K]

I don't use FDDs much but when I do I'm glad they're there.

 

[NightCrawler]

Long Live the Floppy !!!

 

[vegetation]

Floppies aren't dead yet. They still have widespread use in school systems across the world. Just the other day a Prof of mine demanded that our take-home exams be turned in on 3.5" floppies, no exceptions. He wouldn't argue (and you know you never TRY to argue with your prof), despite our entire campus having wireless access and a university standardized classroom web thing, so you just have to comply by having your own floppy/disc combo or using one of the lab comps.

 

[BespinReactorShaft]

In terms of frequency of use, my usb port is getting filed down while the floppy drive is collecting dust. Still, if all else fails, it's still generally easier to boot from a floppy drive compared to a USB drive. I guess the floppy is >90% obsolete, and the final nail in the coffin is only when/if price per megabyte for usb flash falls to the level of other (re)writable media.

 

[LED]

Are Floppy Drives Obsolete?

NO

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: LED

Are Floppy Drives Obsolete?

NO

Yes
(they are not obsolete)

for ~$10, they can be quite useful.

 

[TGHI]

I don't think that they are obsolete...everytime I say, "no, I don't need that taking up space in my case" , it never fails that I'm rooting through drawers a week later trying to find the damn drive. Now I think useless: Zip disks - slow, outdated, and NO ONE has one.

 

[imported_Skorpio]

Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
Its too bad floppies weren't replaced with something like Zip. I remember when Zip 100s were fairly popular long before the rise of CD burners. Sure would have been nice if a large majority of computers came standard with a zip drive but nothing seems to have caught on to replace floppies and no one stepped up to do so. Would have been nice in high school to have just needed 1 zip disk that could work in any computer instead of needing a floppy for just about any class that required a disc for saving computer work.

Yeah, I definitely agree. Zip drives would be tight because that could hold from 100mb to 250mb. If zip drives caught on, definitely the floppy would be obsolete because of storage capacity.

Since zip drives is not standard equipment though, floppys arent obsolete.

Just last summer my biology teacher gave us crucial notes on floppys because his computer didnt have a burner.

 

[imported_Skorpio]

http://img.photobucket.com/alb...opogo15/Untitled-1.gif


How ironic

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

Just ordered parts for a new system, and I bought a $10 Teac floppy.
I use it to boot the system, and flash the bios.

Agree, until they let systems boot from a flash ram, the floppy will stay.

 

[Sureshot324]

Originally posted by: NoGodForMe
Just ordered parts for a new system, and I bought a $10 Teac floppy.
I use it to boot the system, and flash the bios.

Agree, until they let systems boot from a flash ram, the floppy will stay.

You can use a cd to flash the bios of any modern motherboard or even flash it from within windows.

A lot of public and school computers don't have cd burners (because people would use them to pirate music) so floppies are useful. Email works too but isn't as convenient. Also floppies are more compact then cds and don't need to be carried in a case.

 

[imported_jediknight]

Obsolete. I haven't used a floppy disk in 3 years. Anything that can be done with a floppy disk can be done with a bootable CD.

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: SneakyStuff
I use my floppy to flash the BIOS, or do stuff like run "killdisk" to erase HD's. I haven't really given DOS bootable CD's a chance though in all fairness.

Same here-memtest86 and little proggies for reformating HD etc.

 

[beatle]

Originally posted by: jediknight
Obsolete. I haven't used a floppy disk in 3 years. Anything that can be done with a floppy disk can be done with a bootable CD.

Except load drivers for Windows. :|

I can't boot from any of my scsi cdroms, so I need a floppy to boot the computer as well.

 

[Avalon]

I'd rather have my floppy than be without it. Never know when you need it for the occassional bios flash or for something else.

 

[batmanuel]

Besides SATA and SCSI drivers, there's really no need any more for the floppies now that we have flash drives and CDRWs.

If something goes seriously wonrg wth a system and I need to copy some data off of a computer that refuses to boot to Windows because of a virus/driver issue I usually go in with a Knoppix CD to rescue the critical data (try burning a CD of that data with a boot floppy).

And after seeing half of my 3ds MAX class back in college lose their classwork due to various Zip drive issues over the course of the semester while I never had any problems with my CDRWs and Direct CD, I really don't trust Zip drives much farther than I can throw them. They are just way too easy to screw up, and also too expensive and slow to do multiple backup copies like you can with CDs. Good riddance to magnetic media altogether, I say. I just wonder who the heck buys those Zip 750 drives, when you can do much bigger backups almost as fast with a DVD+RW and some good packet writing software.

 

[MichaelD]

Hell no! I just flashed the firmware on my SCSI card with floppies!!!

Floppies are of little use on an end-user workstation in a big company. I.E. user only does email and Office Apps, and the PC is maintained via flashing a Ghosted image if something goes wrong.

On things like servers and workstations and power-user PCs, the floppy is FAR from dead.

 

[syconub]

lo00l~~ i thought floppy drives were obsolete, so i didnt get one on my new rig. The mouse i bought 3 days later needs software in it, that came on a floppy.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: LED

Are Floppy Drives Obsolete?

NO

When you can plug a USB keychain drive into the port, select it, and tell Windows to make it bootable, then floppies may really start to die in droves. Right now, it seems like a near-impossible struggle to get a USB thumbdrive to be bootable, unless the manufacturer is good enough to provide a tool to do it for your specific device.

I really do look forward to such a day. Floppy drives are so inexplicably slow. The access time, the transfer speeds, CPU utilization....awful. But they're cheap.

 

[Sunner]

Yep, to me they've been obsolete for 5 years or so.
For anything that's got to do with diagnostics and such, I use http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/.
If I wanna flash a motherboard in a computer that doesn't have Windows installed, I'll just make a 5 MB FAT16 partition and go there from a boot cd.
I never install the OS on controller cards that need extra drivers.
I'd never dream of putting data that I wanted to keep on a floppy.

That about covers it...

 

[MichaelD]

I own a "modern" 256MB USB Pen Drive; and it's not bootable in any mobo I've tried. I've done the research, tried this ".exe program" etc. It's not bootable.

USB pen/key drives are not the be all, end all, at ALL> Sure, the floppy is a measely 1.4MB. Sure it's SLOOOOOOW. Sure it's delicate...but it's more widely recognized than any other PORTABLE AND easily inserted/merged media these days.

 

[JBT]

No many people including my self still use them.

 

[grrl]

I still have one on my home machine, but I hardly ever use it now that I have a USB pen drive. Still, my wife still needs a floppy drive on occasion, and as others have mentioned, it can still be used for mission critical things.

 

[katka]

not until windows lets you search for drivers on a usb flash drive during installation. too bad they didn't do this with sp2. maybe they never will?

Exactly what I was thinking. It was a nightmare to install XP with the USB floppy. I probably could had put the HD on one of the non raid cables but didn't want to have to keep going in and out switching stuff around.:frown:

 

[bluemax]

I'm surprised noone's mentioned SUPERDISK yet! The LS-120 drive could use its own 120MB floppy-sized cartridges, but it could also read/write plain old 1.44MB disks.

It could also read/write said floppies at about 5-10x the speed!


I was all excited about LS-250 but it dropped off the face of the earth before it was released.