What do you think, yes or no?

info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

[edit] apparently the poll was not created.

Missing the Poll, it may not be totally dead yet but it's life expectancy is extremely short.
I'm part of the support for over 4000 systems and I think I have pulled out a floppy 4 times in the last year.

hmm not quite but almost
ive been using it lately because the computer im using hasent got usb ports

i think that floppies have lost their usage [compared to what they used to be], but its not gone, as most cases still come with bezels for them, and even if you don't use it, having one at least lying around can be the benefit of the doubt, BIOS flashing, boot disks..that sort of thing...windows still makes boot floppies, or at least has them available...the most recent one i know of for sure is boot disks for Windows XP Sp1.

Good riddance to bad rubbish! Long live USB Flash Memory!

I think it's getting there but not quite.

I'm not seeing a universal way of creating a bootable flash drive yet (i.e Right click drive, format, create boot disk), in fact even when I make one the BIOS on one lab that I manage refuses to acknowledge it as a removable drive but instead a hard drive and as such makes it difficult to boot off as it's lumped underneath the main HDD in priority. So for me booting off one is rather finicky.

Floppy's are still used in our older labs for accessing the Imaging menu (no PXE on those NICs) and also have a few scripts etc on another that detects whether or not 2 drives are present in the machine, and of course memory tests. Simple things in other words, which can be shifted to be run from a PXE network boot but yeah it comes back to having that ability in the first place.
Sure you could use bootable CDs but in my opinion it's just not as quick and easy to pop a CD in like you can a floppy or USB

Dead. I haven't used one in 2 years. None of my laptops have a floppy drive (that works) in them. My new laptop doesn't have one, and nor did my last one. I could put one in it, but it was 20 bucks to buy the drive, and thats 20 bucks more than I'd spend on something I'll never use

I still have all my floppies upstairs in my room though, big bin of em. But I never use em, so I'm contemplating donating them to my school or something. Maybe I'll keep 10 or so, but I don't know.

Let's hope so, I lost a load of word docs on a floppy that gave up the gave up the ghost on me a few years back. Since then I shudder whenever I see one. There's no drive in my laptop and my pc has one in that's never been used. I might take it out and use it as a beer mat.

If you're talking about older hardware, then this topic isn't even for you. Very few people today would disagree that ISA is "dead" but I'm sure one of you has a rig that has ISA slots and probably has an ISA card or two laying around. NOT DEAD TO ME I GOT MY AWE32 RIGHT HERE SEE?!

Floppies are "dead" in that Joe Consumer hasn't needed one in several years. Copying files to 1.44MB disks for transport purposes is outdated. If I want to move 1.44MB of data, Joe can upload it somewhere, then download it when he gets where he needs it. Heck, he can just email that much to himself. USB thumbdrives have made moving large amounts of data painless. CD-R and DVD-R have made archival easier and cheaper. Joe Consumer has better ways to move data than a floppy. Joe's data makes it near impossible anyway. To move a single mp3 would require spanning over several disks.

Floppies are now left simply for old computers (obsolescence by choice) and vertical applications. Really, the day they stop putting that stupid interface on motherboards will be a joyous one. It's just wasted space on the board. I haven't used a floppy drive in about 10 years. Don't miss it at all.

mmmmmm beeeeerrrrrr.......!!! Good idea, sylvia, I might even buy you one for coming up with it!

S.SubZero: agreed 100%!

I still keep an old LS120 drive somewhere in a bin, just in case I ever need to use a floppy (or LS120 disk) again, but it's been a few years since I've used one. Haven't had one in any of my PCs for at least 5 years (probably closer to 10).

For carrying files over? No way! We've got networks everywhere and VPNs, email, USB flash memory sticks (including most mp3 players), optical media, etc. Why use tiny old media that's unreliable, a total waste of space and not cost effective? Besides, lots of PCs don't have floppy drives anymore (whereas you can pretty much take network access, optical drives, USB ports and all for granted - unless you're using very old stuff).

Flashing BIOS'es? More and more flashers can run right from windows. And you can use a USB flash memory stick or bootable CD as a floppy if you absolutely have to. Even as a last resort I wouldn't use floppies - too unreliable (even though it checks the CRC before flashing so not too risky). Any old PATA IDE HD formatted/bootable works great. Haven't used a floppy for this in ages.

Booting stuff? Even less of a reason. Boot floppies? Make a bootable CD out of it along with all the other images you might need (or go the lazy way and get your hands on one of the countless ones "out there"...) Even then I hardly use those anymore. And most people have or are moving to WinPE/BartPE instead nowadays. There's always PXE too.

Mass Storage Adapters? Not required anymore with Vista (nor will be with LH). Can be integrated on install CDs otherwise (from existing driver packs - very convenient).

They're unreliable (I've seen soooo much stuff being corrupted - bad sectors were all too common). Excruciatingly slow. Way too small to be useful for anything practical anymore. Not cost effective AT ALL (you can get several 4470MB DVDs for the price of a 1.44MB floppy). Most new PCs don't ship with those drives anymore. Haven't seen blank floppies for sale anywhere in quite a while (unlike say, optical media which is sold everywhere). Even 10 years ago they were already a real PITA. Ever head to install Win95 or Office using floppies? Now THAT took a very long time.

I can't possibly think of a reason why I'd want to use one. They've long been dead in my book (except for old legacy stuff - like most all old hardware). They're the new punch cards.

definatly dead

if xp/2k didn't need F6 floppy, then no-one would use them (besides a few companies who use floppy ghost)

very nearly dead!

I HATE floppies... if they aren't dead yet, kill 'em, please!
1.44 mb? When my flash drive has 512mb? And I can get a flash drive with several gigs? Nope. Only thing I use those darn floppies for is transferring the odd file from an ancient windows 98 computer (soon to get USB support perhaps, thanks to MSFN). Oh, and they're cool to dissect. And then discard promptly.

legacy is all really, i started dropping the usage of them when i got a serial cable and than a network floppies are for occasional use like when im lazy.

i have some isa cards, i have an ibm etherjet and a soundblaster 16

anyway who uses 3.1 without a floppydrive
i couldnt install dos6.22 with a cd

A physical floppy drive is useful for certain things, such as making disk images, but there is not much use left to them. Their small capacity and electromagnetic sensitivity have made them a thing of the past.

We still use them at work, but I haven't used one at home since I had to use my good old Windows 98 CD-ROM Boot Disk (the XP cd wouldn't boot for some reason).

I could care less if floppies go. They fail all the time and its annoying. Flash USB sticks are the future, floppy drives are the past.

I could care less about them, after the masses failing, that I have tossed using for F6 disks over the last 5 years. I use nLite or will use vLite if my next motherboard is not supported like this current one. I have a USB floppy drive, in a drawer/box collecting dust, for good reason, lol.

Well, if nothing else, a thread like this sure separates the men from the boys.
Or the tech's from the nerds and geeks.

As a working tech, I find all sorts of uses for the humble little floppy disk.
I carry a set of utilities on floppies with me on every service call. Of course
I still work on lots of older computers that still have floppy drives in them.

One nice thing about having things on floppies, is you can stop and edit a
batch file if you need to alter something....you can't do that on a CD.
Also you can drop a floppy on the floor or handle it while eating a Hershey
Bar and not corrupt it, like you would with a CD.

I just built a new 'Super System' to test Vista Ultimate. I installed a 3.5"
Floppy Drive in it. I was going to put two of them in there....but I found
out that the bios will only support the A: drive and NOT the B: drive.
Go Figure!
So, the second 3.5" slot is now sporting a multi-card reader and USB port.
(waste not, want not)

In my 'Kit' I also carry a USB Floppy Drive. I use it often and sell about one
a month to a customer who has just bought a new computer with NO
floppy drive in it and still wants to use their old disks with data files and family
pictures on them.

When loading XP, it still stops to ask you for a special drivers "Floppy" to load
SATA or SCSI drivers. I never could coax it into accepting a CD instead of a
floppy disk. I guess that M$ hasn't heard that floppies are Dead.

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?

probably should create a poll asking when or how often you use a floppy. Maybe once a year here for some random problem.

For all practical purposes, they are dead.

However, I'm sad that we never saw a good replacement for the floppy disk. I mean it was universal - you could boot off it, read/write without any fuss, worked in all PCs that had a floppy drive.. I mean the only problem with floppies was that it was unreliable. Sure, you can have bootable CDs, but it isn't the same as a bootable floppy - you can't write back to the CD you booted from. CDRWs and DVDRWs are even more unreliable than floppies were. USB/flash drives - very promising, but unfortunately, booting doesn't work in half the PCs, and there's no straightforward way to make them bootable. Those days were truly the portable ages. In just a single floppy disk I used to carry an OS and plenty of other tools - no installation needed, no fuss. If someone'd have told me it'd end up like this today, I'd be in disbelief. We spend more time fixing, setting up and configuring the computer and trying to learn new things about the computer itself, instead of getting the real work done. How did we get into this mess?

--

I still keep a bunch of floppies, but I use it only for demonstration purposes - most of them are bad or dead, but I bring them alive by using SpinRite - I use them to demonstrate the power of SpinRite. You should really watch it in action when it's trying to recover data from a bad sector - you can actually see the contents of your file slowly being recovered, live! And the Flux Reversal Synthesis graph never fails to amaze people!

death to floppies. i've always hated the **** things. even when i bought the best game on earth (doom shareware) on floppies i hated them.

the only thing floppies are good for is boot sector virii.

re: dexter

i built my system years ago and i've always been able to boot from usb/flash drives. also, it takes me 5 minutes to install an app/game and then run it these days. back in DOS days i'd have to spend an hour making a custom config.sys and autoexec.bat for the stuff i wanted to run depending on if they used EMS or not and how much conventional memory they demanded. it sucked.

so basically i disagree, i'm more productive now than i was back then. and i don't have to keep 3 different floppy sets of OS installation disks for when a random disk goes bad. (yah, remember that?)

Lucky you, because it doesn't work on my PIII-450. I don't expect it to either, but I do expect it to work on my more recent IBM Centrino ThinkPad - but it doesn't. I've tried with three different brands and types of drives, with different bootloaders and programs and I've given up, atleast on this system. Basically, I know that even if I create a proper bootable USB drive, there's absolutely no guarentee that it'll work on all systems. I'm an admin, and I often use bootable CDs/DVDs for various purposes across many systems. I thought the popularity and the fall in prices of flash drives would see me shifting entirely over to USB drives - but it never happened.

Ask Microsoft to give you a straightforward method to install XP from a bootable USB drive, and you'll get a straightforward answer - it's not possible.


I guess I was luckier back then . I know of the dreaded EMS/HIMEM/TSR problems but it was never really a big issue for me - all I needed to do was pick the right floppy disk and boot from it. Eventually I learned enough to modify my config.sys so that I had choices of whether to use a memory manager or not, if so, which one to use, which BLASTER and STACKS settings, and so on. I just had to spend a couple of mins going through the manual of a game to find out the best settings.

These days, games come on multiple CDs or even multiple DVDs (eg: FSX). Did you try installing NFS Carbon or Flight Simulator X? I assure you, it takes much more than than 5 minutes. Even if I have to install an older game like Diablo II (which requires 4 CDs) I'd have to spend a considerable amount of time. But back then, the only installation that was required was extracting from the archive which would take max about a couple of mins.

Ok, so even if you do not consider the installation time, I still require an equal amount of time, if not more, to tweak the resolution, AntiAliasing, Anisotropic filtering, etc with various permutations and combinations to get the game to work at the FPS and graphic detail I'm comfortable at. In the DOS days, you never had to mess with the display settings - you just had to decide between CGA/EGA/VGA and most games automatically chose the best that was available.


So basically, I still stand by my earlier point. I was more productive back then.

I mean imagine this- if I had to type a document, the time it took for the PC to boot till WordPerfect was ready - less than a minute. Today, while the PC boot time is more or less the same, the OS takes quite a long time to boot. Even with hibernation, it isn't as fast as how it was in the DOS days.


Yes, I do remember that. :/ I used to treat those disks more preciously than gold. I packed them with silica gel in airtight boxes and and made sure it was in a cool, dry, dark place. But I'd still end up corrupting a few - I think they get demagnetized over a period of time. .

But once again, I never had much problems with the OS itself, save a few instances of boot sector virii, which was easily solved by FDISK /MBR and SYS C: . If the rest of the OS files also got corrupted, I'd restore them from my backup archive on the HDD itself. Basically, I never had to do a full format+reinstall.

Didn't know my SpinRite could do that.

As for the floppy debate, I would/will never buy a machine without a floppy bay. Floppies have saved my bacon too many times. Nor, by the way, would I have a system without DOS - that too has been a lifesaver.

dead as a dodo. may have some uses for legacy systems and old data, but otherwise...


btw, id advise anybody with old pictures and documents on an old floppy to get the files off before the thing succumbs to some magnetic field

i say its nearly dead not much use for them unless your doing a bios flash

Floppies are SO much fragiler than CDs or USB flash drives. True, CD's can't take a certain level of abuse, but floppies were always going bad from magnets or getting bumped in the wrong place or just randomly flopping - hence the name, I suppose. I don't like them. I avoid them.

@Andromeda43 (message posted May 2 2007, 11:20 AM)

Hit the nail on the head 100 percent i'm a tech myself and i work on alot of PC's with CD drives but some are to old to read CD-R's and CD-RW and somethings just work better coming off a floppy. So the floppy is a good friend to have around.

I use a floppy drive to make images so that I can use them as bootable CDs. I have one installed in my computer now, but for the next one, I'll just use the USB floppy I have laying around somewhere in my big giant slightly-smaller then a 18-wheeler box of cables and miscelaneous computer parts.

As a practical device, enough has been enumerated here about how they don't have much use. However, the one place I've found them useful is when at a client's PC which is older and I find the CD drive is dodgy. All of a sudden I'm faced with a machine that can't boot from a USB and won't recognize my boot CD which I need to work on the machine. The dilemma has been solved inthe past by using the floppy drive to boot and then tranferring control over to the CD.

This is only an emergency type of situation, but I see nothing wrong with keeping one around somewhere or in a machine you can still boot. When I build new machines for friends or others these days, I leave the floppy out. I usually tell them they can put one in anytime they want, but that they'll most likely not want to.

I still have an external 5.25" floppy drive with a huge port connector collecting dust somewhere and taking up space. I even have some of the old really floppy floppy disks with data on them...... Sigh. I won't admit to having rolls of tape or punch cards, though. That might give away my age.... :^)

I've still got floppy drives in most of my machines. Like DonDamm said, they are very useful when CD drives tend not to work properly on the first try. I'm actually going to start putting floppy images on a USB drive in order to boot off of that. I'll see how it goes.

Here's my collection:


And here's how to re-use a copy protected floppy, lmao:

I think the floppy still has it's uses from time to time, but honestly I haven't touched one in ages...

That's just so very sad!

I just built a new PC that in the real world would cost upwards of $1000.00 and YES oh YES, it has a 3.5" Floppy Drive in it.

When you're Flashing a System ROM, or adding those SATA drivers to a fresh install of XP, guess what......YUP, a floppy is called for.

I used 5.25" floppy disks for years before the release of the first 3.5" disks.
That little disk that you could drop on the floor, kick around a bit, dust off and still read, was a real boon to the computer industry. Magnets? You gotta be kidding me! Ever try to completely erase a 3.5" FD with a magnet? I have and I failed miserably. I even used one of those big 6" magnets used to hold a CB Radio antenna on a car roof. NO joy!
I had to use a 110vac degausing tool to finally erase it.
Those little guys are more durable than most people are willing to give them credit for.
I still use the 3.5" floppy in my daily work in the computer business. I go through several hundred a year.

I was saddened to find out that my new mobo will only support just ONE floppy drive. Drive B: is history, I guess.
My Hal 9000 that I just retired, had TWO floppy drives in it. God, I loved that little computer.

Cheers Mates!
Andromeda43

No way! Well... maybe. I still use floppy IMAGES though. I can boot floppy images using Grub4Dos. Much faster.

I agree!

its definately dead, i havent used one in god know how long! i dont even have one in my computer for 90% of the stuff that you would need a floppy for you can use a cd or a usb drive for

So what if you get locked out? Windows sometimes doesn't recognise or find CDs etcetera which are essential to the application you're trying to run. But it always finds the floppy.

hmm, the 486 was annoying before i but in a working floppy dirve. afterall the only other form of transfer was interlnk which is a bit inconvienient.

the floppy disk is always a good thing to have, its how i restore my boot sector its just the easiest way to get out of those annoying situations

i have got no floppy drive with my PC. its time to put them into museum.

Very much alive. Couldn't live without it. Use it every time I reinstall the OS, and frequently use it to boot into DOS to delete files that Windows (XP) won't let me. Booting from CD makes the CD drive A:, and I then cannot access the CD(?) As for copying files to transfer, no, for that I use my USB flashdrive.

It's amazing how old fashion people's thinking is.

Sorry folks, floppy's dead.

Don't believe me? Try to find floppy headers on new motherboards... they're becoming very rare.

Speaking which, Intel's pushing for legacy free. I just built a system today using a new Intel motherboard. Guess what? No floppy headers, no serial ports, no PS/2 ports. 100% legacy free.

if i get locked out then i boot from a linux live cd or UBCD4Win if it doesnt recognize the cd/dvd drive then its time to reinstall



thats not always the case i flash my bios from a cd and my xp cd's already have the sata drivers built into them but i guess if youre a technician and arent allowed to remaster the Windows cds then i guess you have to use the good ol' floppy