Floppy or not to Floppy?

I have a USB floppy drive that I still use.
I have stored my home accounts on floppy disks since 1997.
Yes I could transfer them to a USB drive, but as I have a monthly backup of my desktop I will loose nothing if it stops working.
There is something nostalgic, listening to the whirring and clicking when I use them.
I still have an Omega zip drive and an old SD card reader, looks like getting rid of some of this old tat on E-Bay
 
I have three floppy drives kicking about, only one of which works. Whenever I need to temporally add one to a system one the off chance I need to read a disk, its like Russian roulette picking the one which will work. I suppose I could either throw the two borked ones away, or write on the working one "THIS WORKS", but that would be far, far too easy.
 
Haven't had one on the home PC for a decade.

Optical drive gets used for importing audio CDs to iTunes once in a blue moon, but I don't think I'd include one in future PC builds.
 
Unless you have some explicit usage scenario in mind that only a floppy disk drive could cater to, definitely don't buy one. Pretty much every alternative is better.
 
theMilitant said:
Unless you have some explicit usage scenario in mind that only a floppy disk drive could cater to, definitely don't buy one. Pretty much every alternative is better.
Click to expand...

I think that I need to go through my box full of floppy disks to see what I need to keep, as I used to store old e-mails for work on them plus a lot of accounting stuff etc also.

It's just going to take a lot of time to sort-out :( and then store onto USB sticks what I need to keep.
 
I still use floppy disks occasionally - but usually when messing around with retro gear like C64s and Amigas.

I've even got a "catweasel" pci card - basically a custom floppy controller with a few extras - so I can read more exotic disk formats too. Comes in useful when trying to find data off old disks. Found my 5.25" floppies that I used during college recently.... :eek:

PCI slots are starting to get rarer now though... ;)

Still remember when I had to install windows and microsoft office off floppies for users in work - glad when CD drives came out. First one was a single, possibly twin speed in an external case running off the parallel port. Still a lot faster and easier than floppies though... :D

Last time I used a floppy disk for a PC was actually for updating firmware on a server and fibre card a few years ago. As soon as they started supporting bootable USB sticks never have done that since.

Just done some clearing out of old written CDs, and suspect before long will be doing the same with DVDs, and the pile of old USB sticks to.

Still amazes me sometimes how things have progressed with storage - you can now easily fit on a minute micro SD card all that I used to have to cart around between sites in a big CD wallet and that old external CD drive. :D
 
Why would you conceivably have any need for a floppy disk drive in 2014? What are they about 2mb? Just use a USB stick... I don't even have a DVD drive installed.
 
I barely ever use my laptop when im at home but when i do its normally cause i wanna install something via its DVD drive onto my PC +D

Has anyone used a floppy in the last 10 years?
 
Floppy drives are also nowadays important sometimes, can't hurt to have one.

Let me tell you why...

Few days ago I had a P3 laptop here where the DVD drive was broken and no fitting replacement existed anymore ... nor it could boot from USB (Also not via PLOP).

The only solution was to install XP was by moving it to a 2nd partition and start the installation via a Win98 boot floppy, that worked perfectly fine.


Apart of that its primary important for any kind of retro hardware.
 
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