Floppy Disk Drive... redundant?

I use one for flashing graphics cards, about once a month. Dos-on-usb has not been as reliable. Ive no use whatsoever for an optical drive though.
 
Werewolf said:
IIRC the main manufacturers have stopped making them, but I think either a couple of minor/specialist manufacturers have bought some of the equipment or are still making them.

The mass market for the disks has died out (finally), but they are still in fairly heavy use with specialist equipment that would be very expensive to replace or upgrade so there is still a small market (IIRC a lot of things like weaving machines, semi automated sewing machines, standalone vinyl cutters, cnc etc use floppy disks for the patterns and some of them cost £10k-100k+ so will not be replaced just because the floppy is dying out).

I don't think i've used one in about 5 years, but I still have one in a couple of my machines (disconnected), and a bunch of old disks.
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It was just sony that announced they were discontinuing them, but I think they had something like 75% of the market. I expect there will be a market for a long time to come, not just with specialist equipment, but all over the developing world where they're equipping themselves with older or reconditioned equipment.
 
Last used one for updating the BIOS on a Asus PC-DL Deluxe as it was simplest way of doing it - possibly used it for RAID drivers on the same motherboard.

Once I discovered how to integrate RAID drivers into XP using nlite, I pretty much gave up on floppy disks.

My friends who use an Atari ST in their studio still use them mind :D
 
I can't even remember when the last time I used one was. :p

I do remember having a LS-120 "SuperDisk" drive though, shame they didn't really catch on.
 
Makhaira said:
Nerd grammar nazism strikes again. They're disks, not discs. Discs literally refer to the round shape of objects, disks is short for diskettes.

Thank you for listening :P.
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Floppy disks are round ;)

The casing on the outside is hard and square, however :D
 
If I remember correctly it was sony who announced that they were going to stop making those drives a few months back. However on a whole the floppy drive along with ide connections are slowly but surely for the better being phased out completely now in most households or at least I hope.
 
I would say that the CD never replaced floppies, burning a 20k notepad document doesn't warrant a burn-session. The replacement only happend once you could get a cheap 1gb USB stick. For a while, a floppy drive was useful to install drivers for devices you bought but then the internet started to get bigger so you never really used supplied drivers.
 
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mame said:
I would say that the CD never replaced floppies, burning a 20k notepad document doesn't warrant a burn-session. The replacement only happend once you could get a cheap 1gb USB stick. For a while, a floppy drive was useful to install drivers for devixes you bought but then the internet started to get bigger so you never really used supplied drivers.
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Could not agree more with that statement. The flash discs will most likely be the mobile device to have for quite sometime.
 
A mate turned up at mine just yesterday with this thing in his hand saying do you have something for this. Apparantly there was a CV on it that needed printing.

It was at that point I remembered that i had forgotten all about them
 
1998 called, they want their thread back. Seriously this is a solved problem, USB flash drives / phones / memory cards all work to replace floppy disks. Heck with only 1.4 MB of space they'd struggle to hold anything of much value these days anyway. The quality of floppy disks has been in decline since the mid 90's. If you have some, compare a 80's / early 90's disk to a more recent one. the difference is more than noticable.
 
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