floppy drives......

There used to be a thread about 3.5 inch floppy drives, but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, Is it time for them to go or do you still use one? Do they still have a practical purpose other than booting?

i build pcs and i habent put a floopy drive in for a long time . hell they make bios updates easeier but thats about it

Without one, how do you access files found only on an old floppy? Not everything is on memory sticks and CDs.

Haven't used one in years....

Haven't use one in years too, but that may change soon...one of my classes actually required the students to use floppy. I asked if I can use usb drive or cd....nope, can't use those, floppy only. Heck, I don't even have a floppy drive on my laptop.

I use one about once every other blue moon. You can get a floppy drive for $11 nowadays, so if I was building a computer I would definitely put one in.

i still do /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif but i hardly see it on ppl's computers anymore.

In that thread I mentioned that some government agencies still use them. Sending them a hardcopy document, the digital document on 3.5 and on CD may expedite your issue.

Since I got a USB drive a while back, I wouldn't be surprised if I never use a floppy again. All software distributions went to CD long ago.

If you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to read a floppy, but didn't have a drive, you could probably hunt down an older computer at work, at the library, at Kinkos, etc. and transfer the floppy's contents to a USB drive.

Mac's haven't have them since 1998 so when I got a Mac last year it didn't have one, now I have a PowerBook and it doesn't have one.

Only time that caused a problem is when somebody brought over a file (Cousin brought over a picture or something) and it was on floppy, just grabbed the file on my dad's PC and got it to my Mac via the network.

Well his computer has been rebuilt since then and couldn't get the floppy to work, didn't feel like messing with it at the time so just left it out. That was maybe 6 months ago and we've been fine.

Again my cousin came down needing something scanned, floppy in hand -- he was just going to take it home and eMail it so I just had him eMail from our house. If it'll fit on a floppy it can go on my FTP server and be downloaded, even at dial-up speeds, tolerably. Any larger than that and I'll just burn a CD.

I have 5 or more computers running in the house at any given moment (sorry, it's my job /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif And not a single one has a floppy drive. There are some in boxes in the closet that have them and I have always thought that if I needed it I could drag one out as they still boot and are modern enough to file share anything I need. I did that a couple of times back in '99 when the lack of a floppy was a new thing. Literally twice I had to network from an older machine, and never since then.

Though more expensive than they should be, you can get a USB floppy drive for under $40 or so. If you have a class or something that requires it then you'll want to do that rather than try to mess with having an internal one installed and getting it to actually work.

If you're not in a class or have some other specific need for one, you won't ever even see one, much less need to read or write data to it now days /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

Floppy drives are going the way of the dinosaur. 1.44mb just does not hold much of anything these days. USB Drives are small, handy to use, and very portable. Even a small 16mb drive holds alot more than a floppy could ever dream of holding.

If I remember correctly you can even create a bootable USB drive and use that to boot a computer with.. If the BIOS supports it that is. Floppy drives are just about near the end of their life span in my opinion.

Of course floppies are archaic but for the tiny expense of having one in the PC, why not? The cost in time of running to another location or hauling out another old PC and booting it up will instantly wipe out any savings of not having a floppy. My wife needs one for some of her college classes, if you can believe that.

I still have a good turntable, cassette deck, and 8-track recorder...if you can believe THAT. Some of us never grow up. Then there was this cool wire recorder for sale that I was considering...

Yes.

The computer here at work (about 3Yr old 1ghz) and my old Win 95 166mhz both have floppie. And they get used from time to time.

I'm with jayflash and some of the others,

Floppy drives are so cheap you might as well stick one in your machine. It's also the easiest way to "sneaker net" small files from one machine to the next if they aren't networked.

I guess as long as some folks are running older machines without USB support, no bootable cd-roms, and operating systems where you have to load drivers for thumb drives, I'll keep my cheap old floppy drive around.

Mike

When I built my new system running win XP with a SATA type hard drive I had to use a dang floppy to format the SATA drive AND load it's drivers as the winblows installation disc lacked serial ata drivers AND would not accept them from a cd rom drive!! OH I was soo mad! I was just luckly I had the old floppy drive and another computer to download the SATA drivers that did not come with the drive.
I built my first computer in 1995 and from that day on, after all the rebuilds and upgrades the only componet that has remained unchanged is the same floppy drive I got back in 95.
To flash the bios on my dvd burner the maker only had drivers for doing it with a floppy drive! Luckly I did find a way around that.
I still have the old 5.25? inch drive laying about.

If I were building a PC for myself, I could easily forego the floppy drive. I did have an optional floppy drive installed into my notebook PC because I do still run into situations where I need to transfer a small file to a customer's PC with no network connection possible. I do have a CD burner in this notebook so it is less of an issue of what it was with my old notebook when I still would have to make multi-disk zip files.

I personally wouldn't dream of having a computer without one even though its uses now are somewhat limited. You never know when you'll need to transfer files to a machine with no CD-ROM, or emergency boot the machine. And to carry around a small amount of data nothing is more convenient. CDs are just too big to carry in a shirt pocket, and many machines don't have Zip or LS-120/240 drives. I'll admit the floppy is getting more and more useless. I use CD-RW for backup, and now that I have all my machines networked together I don't even need any physical media to transfer files between machines.

Neither of our laptops have one either. We both have USB flash drives and the laptops could boot from them if necessary. Have a USB cd burner to share between if needed. I have a floppy drive on my work laptop but if I ever need to sneaker net a file between the two I use the usb drive, 1.44M can barely hold a document these days. When I want something shirt pocketable I burn to a 3.5" cd or business card CD (I handed out my last resume on those instead of paper).

How do you boot a machine without a floppy to run diagnostics or repair when the normal hard drive system won't boot?