Floppy disk usage

[Kevin C. Tofel]

My typcial Sunday routine is to head to the local WaWa convenience store for a coffee and paper to spend a few hours perusing the ads and stories. I couldn't help but notice this AWESOME deal from Office Max: Buy 1 floppy disk organizer at $3.99 and get one free. What a deal...it holds 40 floppies, so for $4 you can organize up to 80 floppy disks! C'mon, are they really still selling these????

OK, so here's the question: how many of us still use floppies in this digital and flash storage "age"? I remember using 5.25" floppies on my C-64 (in fact I still have them!)....when they really WERE floppy! I think I was getting 360kb of storage and I remember using a hole punch to cut a notch in the cover to use the other side of the disc to double my storage!

I tend to store files on a hard drive, my PPC or my Creative MuVo USB drive\mp3 player. If you use some other storage device(s) not listed in the poll, let us know what you use. I woldn't be surprised if someone here as a fibre-channel SAN solution in their basement!

KCT

[Steven Cedrone]

About the only thing I use a floppy for these days, is when I need a boot disk (and the machine I am "playing" with can't boot from flash/CD)

Storage, no way! Flash drive for me!

Steve

[Brad Adrian]

I got a new company PC around the start of the year and it doesn't even have a floppy drive -- internal OR external.

Personally, I miss it, because it's a lot easier to copy files to a floppy than burn them to a CD or CR-RW.

[Dave Beauvais]

Floppies suck. They're slow, too small to hold anything useful these days, and are frighteningly unreliable. Along the lines of what Steve said, the only thing I've used a floppy for in the last couple years is booting from to install BIOS upgrades. Now we're starting to see PCs that can boot from USB flash devices, so even this use may one day go away.

[lonesniper]

I hate floppies. Flash and USB memory devices are the best.
My floppies always seemed to fail on me.

Now they are only used to install SCSI drivers on OS installs, which is a pain cause don't have floppy drive installed anymore. SCSI makers provide drivers on CD, but OS looks for floppy! Sort is out MS give us an option to install drivers from CD.

[dean_shan]

I only use floppys for booting off of. Like the for dinking around with Menuet OS (http://www.menuetos.org/) and Floppix (http://floppix.ccai.com/) or to erase a hard disk securly with Autoclave (http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/). As for storage portible storage needs I use this. (http://www.laks.com/english/i_memory.html)

[nice_micael]

Don't need it , don't use it.

[Jason Dunn]

Floppy drives are dead - I loathe them. Flash drives and bootable CDs solve the problem entirely, even for boot disks.

[Jon Westfall]

Only time I drag them out anymore is to teach my A+ students to use a boot disk.

Now my friends in college still use them way too often... but at least lab staff get to pick up a nice number of free abandoned ones.

Jon.

[Jon Westfall]

On another note, did anyone else see this happen with this post? Repeated numbers? http://bugjr.com/strange.jpg

[buckyg]

Haven't used a floppy at home for probably 2 years now.

At work, got my current laptop about a year ago. It's got a built-in floppy, never been used. My previous laptop didn't have a built-in floppy but an external one. It was a pain to have to carry it, so i never did on business trips. So inevitably, someone would have a file to give me on a floppy. We usually had a conversation that went like this:
"What do you mean you DON'T have a floppy drive?!?!? HOW am I supposed to give you the file you asked for???"
"You could send it to me via email or I could copy it from you over the network"
"Oh... Yeah. You're right, I guess I could"

[ctmagnus]

On another note, did anyone else see this happen with this post? Repeated numbers?

I've been getting that for ages.

OT, I haven't touched a floppy in over a year, except for fiddling around with the 486 that's in the basement.

[Tom W.M.]

I use floppies all the time...and I absolutely loathe them. They are totally unreliable—I've thrown away three so far this month. They're just not made well anymore, and all of my old (and well constructed) ones are feeling their age. :(

The computers at school are totally locked-down, so flash keys are out of the question—Novell blocks them. They are so locked-down that I can't simply FTP the files to my webspace and download them—IE won't allow the downloading of DOC files. I just get a dialog telling me that "security settings don't allow" it. That leaves two options to get the files off of the server: 1) Use the non—locked-down Mac in the German room to put the file on a floppy and print it on one of the horrible PCs, or 2) Type the absolute path into the MS Word (that was pretty hard word-around to figure out). :evil: