Is this the death of 3.5"
 

According to the BBC, PCWorld will stop selling the Floppy Disc.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6314251.stm

I've got hundreds of them. I'm slowly putting them on my lappy via a USB Floppy drive.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I reckon floppies died around 2003.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

only for newer machines with native sata controllers wanting to run xp etc as you will still need a from for none native sata and unless you slipstream into windows install the only way to get them in is off a floppy

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I haven't used a floppy for a couple of years now. :) USB memory sticks have just taken over! ;)

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

My wife occasionally needs to hand in assignments for a course she is doing, and they require her to send them in the post on a floppy. Luckily, I still have one 5 year old lappy that has a floppy drive.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Was on a client site a couple of years ago and had to copy some configs off an old Proliant. It literally took about 45 minutes walking around the building to find someone to cadge a floppy off!

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I've done college courses that don't allow USB sticks,

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Nope, they are still widely used in business, even now - its for home use that they have dropped off rapidly in the last couple of years - the rise of USB flash sticks has done this, and will eventually kill the floppy for good, first for home users and eventually in the workplace.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Were I work I only have 1 Floopy disk (contains licence for SW package), everything else is either on CD, DVD or sent via email/websites.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

My latest PC doesn't even have a floppy drive.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

yeah, mainly cos places like the public sector (colleges and councils etc) have a phobia about USB sticks. I'm one of only 4 people allowed them in our department!

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

The same public sector bodies that allow their executives to walk around with smartphones/PDAs loaded with unencrypted flash media, not to mention leaving laptops in seedy pubs ;)

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Bye bye 3.5 you was sort of loyal but now you can join 5 1/4 in never never land :waving:

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

A couple of years ago I had to find a supplier of 5.25" floppies for an old computer linked to an even older bit of equipment (DEXA scanner) in a very old hospital. I managed to order two boxes from a tiny company in the UK.

Some of the older computers were built to last.

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2007/01/2.jpg

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Had to get floppy for my PC
so i can install SATA raid drivers

only used the drive twice
and both for install and reinstall of windows

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.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I remember when Zip disks were supposed to take over from Floppys...guess that didn't quite work out, hehe

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

indeed, the good old Iomega Zip and Jazz drives...!

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Yea I had 2 internals and 1 external, heh

I also ...rather stupidly, bought one of those SparQ drives from Syquest, does anyone remember those?
They got rave reviews, until all the reports started coming in of them breaking down

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

The Zip drives were too expensive and over rated and as soon as CDRW drives became so cheap, they were gone in seconds.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Where the sparQ drives the 120mb super floppies? I nearly bought one of those myself.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

I used an old Intel MDS that had 8"

In our archives I once found a 5MB Hard drive wich was about the size of the average PC base unit.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

SparQ were 1Gb disks. Big problem with them seemed to be head damage from the drive it the disk was pushed in poorly.
I have one. Hooks up to the Parallell port (remember them), have never managed to get it to work on XP.
http://www.syquest.com/
http://www.syquest.com/catalog/spqcart.gif
I think Iomega did a number on this, equal technology to theirs with 10 times the storage so Iomega worked to put the company out of business. I had a fun day somewhere in 99 burining the contents of these discs to CDs.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Yea, 1gb was the total capacity
Sounded like someone revving a car engine when you put a disk in
Wasn't to bad for a portable device, but once it broke one disk, that same disk would break any drive you put it in!
Freaky thing.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

PC world not selling floppys probably isn't the end of the floppy. That will happen when motherboard manufacturers stop including the floppy drive channel (like they did with the old ISA cards). Most new motherboards still do include FDD support but a for most people, its a waste of valueable real estate

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

It did have a really wierd spin up, staged, as you say, like a car revving.

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Wasn't that the sampler the size of a house (and the price of one too) with a light pen so you could 'draw' your sounds? Remember seeing one of those on The Tube and being totally amazed :)

Nowadays, they use them on the tube instead - as barriers to slow the trains down if they run red signals ... ;)

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

No, your thinking of an LS120 drive, idea was that it'd read the 120mb media and floppy disks as well.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

:) Yes it was indeed, with a separate card for each voice (8 in total on the Series 1). First used by Peter Gabriel on his "3" album then by all and sundry in studios round the world during the 80s. You might remember Nick Rhodes taking his series 3 on tour with Duran Duran, in fact, I think he still does for the pose value. Needless to say, the quality of the samples you could store on an 8" floppy weren't exactly hi-fi (8 bit 24KHz to be precise).

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Customers at work still use floppy disks - to upload/download data from/to their Primary Care Trust, and to save the next day's appoinment list, in the event of disaster. Floppies are still alive and well :)

Re: Is this the death of 3.5"
 

Unlike your customers' patients? :p: :D