Are floppy disks becoming a thing of the past?

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SWEET!! ! I love old computers!! !

I have floppies that still work from the early 80s.

course those are low density 5.25 floppies (the ones that are really floppy, big and black)

the 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppies are total crap. the 720K low density ones were ok.
even the 1.44MB floppies used to be ok but anything you can get now (and even back in the late 90s) wont hold data for very long. perhaps it was somethign wrong with me. but I could get disks right out of the box with bad spots on them or that wouldn't even format. and even after I had them formatted and put data on them they would loose data sometimes in the same day that I wrote to them.


heres a picture of my coco3 with tandy FD-501 disk drive I'm in the process of imaging my floppy disks to a hard drive and then to a CD so that I don't loose the data on them.

I use floppy disks all the time. I use them to store my college work so I can access it both at home and at college. If I save stuff onto the floppy disk, all I have to do at the end is remove the disk, rather than if I worked off the hard disk, i would have to copy all my work onto the disk at the end of the session, and I would forget to do this.

Floppies also have the advantage that they are a large flat shape, so you can put a label on them and write the contents on the label, and then store it neatly in a box or a file. This also makes it possible to dedicate 1 disk to 1 project, rather than storing everything on one big USB flash drive. Imaging if you lost your flash drive which contained everything? Or if it broke? At least if you loose or damage one disk, you only loose a small part of the work.

They are just useless when it comes to wanting more than 1.44MB for a file.

Why not store on SD cards instead? I like to think of SD cards as a tiny floppy disk which is better in all respects. SD also has a little read/write switch which means you can turn off the ability to write to it if you want to.

Floppies are a rarity now days, it's like floppy drives suddenly disappeared around 2004 or 2005 (my current computer, which has no floppy drive, was built in 2005).

Flopped floppy topic

The data on my floppies kept getting corrupted even though I kept them in a case and was careful not taking them through store checkpoints. My teens introduced me to the USB flash drives and I have not looked back since.

they became a thing of the past like five years ago when they stopped making computers with them. My computer doesn't have one. Thumb drives and external drive and - hell - even some plug 'n' play mp3 players.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyAY06IcH4Y[/youtube]

actually i'm old enough (18-19) to remember when CDs were a futuristic and innovative concept. I remember back in the early 90's my dad had an Commodore Amiga with the original Wing Commander, Renegade: Legion, Galactic Conqueror and Cyber Empires. Those were some awesome games. Memories of playing floppy games. sigh.

I miss floppies. They were damn durable compared to CDs and DVDs. The only thing I don't miss is swapping them 50+ times when installing a program.

On most consumer desktops and portables, they don't place floppy disks in anymore due to the wide popularity of USB flash drives, BluRay discs, and Secure Digital cards (I know, I'm a big nerd, you don't have to tell me!).

On most business desktops, you still might need a floppy drive internally for some reasons.

Keep in mind, you can still buy USB external floppy drives, so everyone can have a floppy drive.

Floppy drives today are hell for me, because they only store 1.44MB of storage. I need excessive amounts of storage on removable media (at least 128MB), because I save several computer related tutorials for online use on my flash drive (it's a 6GB flash drive), and I've taken up 4GB in the one year I've been using it.

Trust me. I've been using computers since I was 1 and a half, and I'm ethically involved in computers now, and I'm 11 and a half!

Most computers can boot of a USB thumb drive now (that are new) so the need for a floppy is kinda, no longer.

Floppies are an EXTREMELY unreliable media. When I was a kid going to school this is all we used. By the time I was done the school year I'd usually go through about 5 different floppies because they'd always break, and I'd have to use a new one.

It's really a shame that floppies have been considered obsolete because there are compression programs that can fit big files on floppies.

Why use compression when you can get 512MB or greater flash drives that are faster anyway? I don't miss floppies much. although I wish I could get 5.25 floppy media new.

It's kinda a shame they weren't able to update the format and make it hold like a gigabyte per disk, or something. I know that's what the zip disks were all about, but those didn't take off.

In any case, just use SD cards. They look just like little floppies and even have a cute little read-write tab.