Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

In my last job I was still using 8" discs, and punched tape, and I'm not joking.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I havent seen or used a floppy for work purposes for some 6 or 7 years now. Its all CD or secure file transfer now.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I personally stopped using floppies for my own purposes years ago (even with drivers, I just tend to slipstream them into a new XP CD). Too unreliable.

At work, we use them as boot disks to log on to the network and run an uattended install of Windows XP. It's quite a neat disk actually. It has drivers for all our various network cards and chipsets, and uses Plug and Play to detect the right one and install it. All we have to do is provide the machine name and select whether it's a staff or student machine.

We also have boot USB sticks, but not all of our PCs boot properly from USB.

However, with Microsoft releasing Windows PE as part of the Vista Distrubution kit, we'll be using that and boot cds from next year. I know we could theoretically have used Boot CDs this year, but our current bootdisks write details of the configuration to the boot media, so CDs are out.

Of course, some students still use floppies, and complain bitterly (and sometimes try and blag coursework extensions) when the floppy containing the one and only copy of that massively important coursework) becomes corrupted.

In fact, a few years back, I even had a student try and save video to a floppy.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I reckon the old 56k dialup modems will be phased out sometime in the future as well. :)

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

That will also require the death of the fax machine.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

What!, you mean I can get something faster than my US Robotics 28.8 modem (which cost £150 back in the day). :D

DW

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

:rofl:

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Which could mean that you've been in your current job for 25 years...

Interestingly, the 8" disk was designed to hold as much data as one box of punched cards.

nostalgia ON

My first programs were written on punched cards, in FORTRAN. Sighhhhh...

nostalgia OFF

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I used to hate floppies as they used to breakk too easily and then you would have half the disk stuck in the drive.
They were good for Word documents when I was in school but now you just can't fit anything on them.

As for the SATA drives, couldnt you just download the drivers on to a USB stick, boot from that and then install the SATA hardrive ?

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Ahhh the old Fairlight CMI Series I used to use 8" floppies. :)

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Funny thing happened the other a day. A mate came round to use my Powerpoint as she needed to do a presentation and she brought floppies. I took one and went to put it in my PC but suddenly remembered I don't even have a floppy drive anymore, lol. :dunce:

Thats how long its been since I even used one let alone saw one.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Whats a floppy disc?

LOL only joking.


We advise all our users to use USB sticks to save data getting lost as floppies are so unreliable. All our new pcs come with floppy drives but I cannot remember the last time I used one.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

When I finished my last complete system build I included a floppy as I thought it would be useful for any old documents I had etc. Floppys in my experience are so unreliable that any of my old documents where currupted anyway so where useless.
In the whole 3 or so years I have had this build I have used the floppy 3 times (Technically 4 though that time it had been transplanted into another machine). First time was to retreive old documents wich unfortunatley as above went wrong as the data was currupt. Second time was when a friend found an old disc that we used to mess around with in school stuck under his carpet when they where decorating (Good old trip down memory lane on that disc, was very nostalgic). Third time was a bios flash.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Have you seen the new Sony M2 memory cards. 1GB on a fingernail sized card. It looks very James Bond. I was showing someone the card in my phone and commented that it holds as much information as 700 floppy discs on a tiny card.

Pic attached. That is a Bottle top for size comparison.

Only time I have used the FDD on this PC is for a rebuild (SATA RAID drive) and for some file recovery software (failure of said raid drives).

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

FDD died years ago. I haven't included a floppy drive on my main machine builds since 2000.