Floppy Drive

njj1046

njj1046

njj1046

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Today I took my PC apart and gave it it's monthly dusting and tried to tidy up the cables a bit.

Then I thought.. why the hell have I still got a floppy drive in there :confused:

So I removed the drive, ugly rounded ribbon cable and replaced the power cable from the PSU for one that didn't have a FDD power connector on it saving some room while I was at it.

The only thing that I've used it for since installing Vista 64 is running Memtest86+ off a floppy. Memtest is available for USB sticks and ISO images so that isn't a problem.

Question is.. would there ever be a need for me to have a FDD in my system at all in the future? The only thing I can think of is installing Vista and it needed specific drivers to install e.g. RAID etc. Can drivers like this be loaded off a USB stick during install?
 
Quite a lot of motherboards now let you have the option to boot from USB as well, so I'd guess you should be able to install your drivers off one during the install too. Cant confirm, just assuming though :p

But considering Ive not seen a new PC come with a floppy drive for years, I think its pretty safe to say they're useless now
 
Vista allows you to use a USB stick or a cd to load any RAID drivers. If you need to load them for XP however you will need a floppy drive. You can work around this easily though by integrating the drivers into the XP install cd using nLite.

EDIT: The only thing i still use a floppy drive for is updating BIOS. I know you can use a flash drive to do this but it's less effort for me to just open the case and quickly plug in the floppy drive rather than having to prepare a bootable USB drive etc.

Having said that, i'm not sure if newer motherboards allow you to use a flash drive without hassle. It seems a little backwards that we still need them for things like this though.
 
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I have not had a floppy drive in over 6 years! If I needed to install raid drivers, I just used nlite to add them to a windows CD (I've only been using raid for about 2 years).
 
The only reasons i can think of that needed a floppy was loading drivers when installing windows and flashing the bios, but there are ways in which you can do these without a floppy now. Remove the FDD and keep it in case of an emergency

MW
 
Ive still got a floppy in my PC, I find it useful for flashing bios's and the like, i know its not necessary but ive got a tidy ribbon cable that is well hidden and its in my card reader so why not :)

Hawker
 
When loading Vista onto my SSD's I left the old HDD in and browsed that for the RAID drivers - worked a treat!

I bought a USB floppy for work just in case it was needed.
 
Thanks peeps. Glad to hear Vista can install RAID drivers etc off a USB stick.

I can't think of anything else that would actually require a FDD these days, but I'll keep the drive safe just in case :cool:
 
Yeah, there are plenty of alternatives, USB, CD/DVD-rom.

But all of these have potential issues.

When I had to flash my Seagate 7200.11, my SATA DVD-RW would cause the flash untility to hang before it loaded. I had to resort to using an old ide DVD drive. :)
 
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