Question of the Day - Wednesday, August 21st, 2024

What Size Floppy Drive/Disks Have You Used?

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Sally PB said:
We used the 5 1/4" where I worked (and on our first home computer). The accountant there used the 8" on her computer.

We had the 3 1/2" discs at home for a long time. Hubby found some in a desk drawer the other day. :lau
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I found some in a bin. I ended up with rainbow color blank floppies. The only one written onto in the box happened to be used as a Windows ME boot disk.
 
notabitail said:
I used some last week.
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As I said...

Almost. I know a couple of locations with air gapped systems that still use floppies for certain ops. I have a stack of 3.5's sitting here too, but I don't even have a 3.5 drive anymore so they're just nostalgia. Most modern systems don't even ship with a dvd or bluray drive these days. Magnetic media is almost the exclusive realm of tape backup systems and even they're fading.
 
azurbanclucker said:
As I said...

Almost. I know a couple of locations with air gapped systems that still use floppies for certain ops. I have a stack of 3.5's sitting here too, but I don't even have a 3.5 drive anymore so they're just nostalgia. Most modern systems don't even ship with a dvd or bluray drive these days. Magnetic media is almost the exclusive realm of tape backup systems and even they're fading.
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:eek: No 3.5 drive? Not even external? EEEK!

I have a DVD/CD drive on my tower. I don't think I'd like having to not have that since I like ripping my CDs.
 
notabitail said:
:eek: No 3.5 drive? Not even external? EEEK!

I have a DVD/CD drive on my tower. I don't think I'd like having to not have that since I like ripping my CDs.
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Why would I waste space and power in a case for a technology that hasn't been mainstream since before you were born? Even dollar store usb sticks are at LEAST 512mb. 350x the capacity of a 3.5" floppy.

Spindles are next, flash and solid state are faster, store more, and require less footprint. Once the cost levels out for larger capacity storage, even spindle disks will go away. IOPS are king and a single spindle is 90-120 IOPS. SSD's are tens of thousands, and NVME even more. There's no comparison.

I know you're a fan of legacy tech, but aside from nostalgia, it's completely impractical. I have an external bluray burner if for some reason I need physical media, but otherwise all my backups are solid state and cloud-based. Even my ancient fileserver will boot off a usb stick. And it's 20 years old.
 
azurbanclucker said:
Why would I waste space and power in a case for a technology that hasn't been mainstream since before you were born? Even dollar store usb sticks are at LEAST 512mb. 350x the capacity of a 3.5" floppy.

Spindles are next, flash and solid state are faster, store more, and require less footprint. Once the cost levels out for larger capacity storage, even spindle disks will go away. IOPS are king and a single spindle is 90-120 IOPS. SSD's are tens of thousands, and NVME even more. There's no comparison.

I know you're a fan of legacy tech, but aside from nostalgia, it's completely impractical. I have an external bluray burner if for some reason I need physical media, but otherwise all my backups are solid state and cloud-based. Even my ancient fileserver will boot off a usb stick. And it's 20 years old.
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I don't mean in a actual big rig. I thought you would have at least one external USB based floppy drive, but I suppose I just assumed.

I'm really looking forward to the cost getting cheaper on SSDs. Hopefully the spinny disks will get cheaper as well.

I do have most of my physical music CDs ripped to both FLAC and MP3 and stored on a NAS. The CD drive really does help with ripping and burning, though everyone's use case for a computer is different. I will say that I have heard numerous older people (way older than me) in a uproar because their computer doesn't have a disc drive.
 

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