[Dave Bullard]

Sony has decided to end production of the humble floppy disk. This is making me feel my age as I clearly remember when the 3.5-inchers (what we called 'stiffies') came out in the '80s!

Anyone still using them? And, if not, have you still got any lying around with data you haven't migrated to newer technologies?

Cheers
Dave

[JZ]

wow, i thought they were gone years ago, i didn't even know they being made so no big loss. i can't even remember the last time i needed or used one.

jz

[Mychael]

I can remember when we had 5.25's, when the 3.5's came out they were very expensive for a pack of 10.

Then there were the 100meg Iomega Zip drives. Had one of them but not very cross platform as few people had them on their machines.

[Dave Bullard]

I was on SyQuest for quite a while before finally making the move to Zip.

Cheers
Dave

[mickdevlin]

Haven't used a floppy in years. The Zip drives had an even shorter life: they arrived and disappeared in just 10 years.

[skyhawkmatthew]

Um, wow. I'd "only" need 308,000 floppies for my iTunes library!

As a measure of scale, I estimate that a 720p EyeTV recording exported for tv would need a new floppy disk every 2 and a quarter seconds, which would get somewhat annoying after the EIGHT HUNDREDTH disk for a half-hour show!!

[Ken Gracey]

Hmm how will this effect windows users ? you barley see a PC without a floppy drive in it even today.

But just a side note I still have a Floppy kicking around with mac os 3.31, and Microsoft excel for mac on it, from 1985/86




TL

[Dave Bullard]

Um, wow. I'd "only" need 308,000 floppies for my iTunes library!

As a measure of scale, I estimate that a 720p EyeTV recording exported for tv would need a new floppy disk every 2 and a quarter seconds, which would get somewhat annoying after the EIGHT HUNDREDTH disk for a half-hour show!!

Nice one, SHM!

My first computer was a Toshiba T1000 laptop PC





(Aargh, what was I thinking? ), and every floppy I had also had to have the application loaded on it as there was no hard drive. Boy, those were bad old days ...

Cheers
Dave

[clinton1550]

I have an entire shoebox full of floppy disks in a cupboard and three Macs that can still read them. Or at least I think so, one of the drives might not work.

I do look back on floppy disks with a certain amount of nostalgia but I quickly remember what a pain they were, 1.44 MB! I remember I once moved a folder full of images from one computer to another, I could only fit three to four images on a disk so I had a stack of ten disks. Insert disk, copy, eject, next disk. A year later we were networking our Macs together with printer cables, then daisy chained telephone cables, then we upgraded to an ethernet network. I stopped using floppy disks 12 years ago, I haven't missed them at all and I was genuinely surprised to heard they're still around.

I'm currently copying 156 GB from one drive to another, imagine how long that would take with floppy disks, I would need a stack of 164,999 floppy disks!

[JZ]

i did a very similar thing, i just upgraded my MacBook HD to 500GB then wirelessly synced almost 200GB of content from iTunes on my Mac to the MacBook, it took a while but i'd hate to think how long it would've taken with floppies.

jz

[Ken Gracey]

Hey just to throw a red herring in here, but we are discussing how useless the Floppy drive / Disks are... how many more years will it be, until we say, do you remember all this years ago when you had to back up 4 terabytes of data on those useless CDs.




TL

[JZ]

TL I don't even use cd's. To me they are already a thing of the past. I back up to external drives.

jz.

[Ken Gracey]

Well there you go... its just proves my point, I haven't backed up using a CD in maybe 2 years, and for good measure, i will include DVDs in that picture.

And if steve gets his way, we wont be using Hard Drives either in time to come, it will be cloud computing or maybe SSD drives.


TL

[JZ]

yep i agree TL, i hardly ever use my optical drive except for the new Mac OS X. I buy all my music from iTunes and I'm at about 20 - 30% of my TV shows and movies are also from iTunes. If iTunes could match the full HD of Blu-Ray and get all the extra features and match the price of the cheap DVD's I'd buy all my stuff from there, and I can't wait till video games go full digital download too.

I'll take digital downloads and SSD drives any day. It takes up less space!!!

jz.

[clinton1550]

Well there you go... its just proves my point, I haven't backed up using a CD in maybe 2 years, and for good measure, i will include DVDs in that picture.

And if steve gets his way, we wont be using Hard Drives either in time to come, it will be cloud computing or maybe SSD drives.


TL

We used to do occasional backups on CDs, I used to backup stuff to dual layer DVDs about once a month but I stopped doing that when the price of hard drives dropped a few years ago. Hard drives are just so cheap these days, I'm going to add another to the collection tomorrow.

(That will be my eighth in case you're wondering).

[Some Random Bloke]

He he. I remember when 3.5" floppies were coming out. They were so cutting edge - smaller and held more data! They were the good ol' days Thank God for Moore's Law.

[Mychael]

TLCAUS, on 27 April 2010 - 06:59 PM, said:

Hmm how will this effect windows users ? you barley see a PC without a floppy drive in it even today.
TL

At the last PC market I went to there was a stall holder selling 3 floppy drives (new) for $10 for the 3. What you'd do with 3 I have no idea.
I've long since discarded an internal floppy drive on my builds but keep a USB one in the draw as I've have a few retired Pc using friends that still use them. Up until recently I saw you could still buy boxes of the disks from Australia Post shops and Office Works.