Sony to Pull Out of Floppy Disc Market

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Sony has announced that it is pulling the plug on floppy disc production by 2011. Wait, when is the last time you used a floppy? Does anyone still use those things?

Sony Corp. will discontinue domestic sales of its 3.5-inch floppy discs at the end of this fiscal year, the company announced on Friday. The electronics giant, which boasts a 70 percent share of the domestic floppy-disc market, will withdraw from the market at the end of March 2011.
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The last few times i used a floppy was to provide a AHCI/RAID driver via F6 during a windows xp install, with a factory OEM windows xp with SP3 disk, that did not have intel ICH10R drivers slipstreamed.

Its so stupid that windows xp will only take a AHCI or RAID driver via a floppy drive or via making a slipstreamed disk using nlite.
Really sucks that Microsoft never gave windows xp an update that would allow it to provide the driver via a USB drive like in vista and win7.
 
A part of me will die with this deadline. Makes me sad inside, floppy disks have been a part of my life as long as i can remember
 
Floppy? What's that? :p



Speaking of which... does anyone still make/use the real floppy's? (the thing guys that were actually floppy)
 
I haven't used a floppy disk for anything since at least 2005.
 
Parmenides said:
Speaking of which... does anyone still make/use the real floppy's? (the thing guys that were actually floppy)
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You mean the big arse 8 inch floppys or the 5.25" ones?

You will be hard pressed to find either in use i think
 
Floppy disks are still useful for older machines in research labs. I used one a few days ago.
 
I remember during the Commodore days I would take a hole puncher and clip the diskette to use the other side. Like Gir I will look at my floppy disk and say: "I miss you floppy..snif..snif"
 
Obviously, the rampant issue of pirates ignoring the adage "don't copy that floppy" has caused Sony to have to pull out of the floppy business.
 
Some of my older audio gear still uses 3.5" for patches or samples. Guess I'll stock up since these will probably become like gold for vintage sampler/synth geeks.
 
k1pp3r said:
You mean the big arse 8 inch floppys or the 5.25" ones?

You will be hard pressed to find either in use i think
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Yeah, the 8 inch frisbees that would bend a little (hence "floppy"). Oh man, I wonder where those might still be used.
 
Time for me to buy a few hundred of them then. I still have a Win98 machine for legacy gaming since DOSbox or even DOS in VirtualBox just sucks for old games. Especially ones that load some assets from CD.

And then there is still the occasional machine that I need an F6 floppy for.
 
I used a 3.5" floppy in January installing RAID drivers on a machine at work... Before that, i used a few as bootdisks for an older laptop i have. Granted, i haven't gotten a new floppy disk in years.
 
Not all of us can flash BIOS from windows. ;)

Just sayin'. There's some non-trivial applications for floppies. When I can do BIOS flashes in Linux, I'll give up my last box of floppies.
 
My brother has a 5.25" on his system for lols, and I have a 3.5" for reinstallation of all my old games, should I loose the hard drive and my CD backup.
 
Flashed a BIOS last week using a floppy.

I have a brand new box of them on my shelf......:eek:
 
You guys need to stop thinking everywhere is on the same tech level as your country. This really means the THIRD WORLD nations are finally done with floppies
 
Slightly off topic, but isn't there something like a floppy adapter for memory cards? I mean, it kinda bugs me that there are cassette tape adapters for mp3 players yet I can't seem to find a floppy adapter without being required to install some kind of special software. :/

Not that I would use one for file storage or sneakernet purposes, it would be awfully handy to have on hand for PCs that can't boot to USB (hell, I even have a computer that can't boot from CDs) or for loading RAID drivers in 2000/XP if nlite wasn't an option.
 
LOL, Steve said "pull out" in a thread that has nothing to do with pr0n...

I still get people bringing in systems with floppies, who use them daily for their old old old school DOS based programs, the kind that work perfectly for what they do, the company doesn't exist anymore and a current competing program would cost piles of green.
 
interested said:
The last few times i used a floppy was to provide a AHCI/RAID driver via F6 during a windows xp install, with a factory OEM windows xp with SP3 disk, that did not have intel ICH10R drivers slipstreamed.

Its so stupid that windows xp will only take a AHCI or RAID driver via a floppy drive or via making a slipstreamed disk using nlite.
Really sucks that Microsoft never gave windows xp an update that would allow it to provide the driver via a USB drive like in vista and win7.
Click to expand...

Yeah, and they should have provided that update for Windows95 and Windows 3.1 too while they were at it :p
 
The last time I used a floppy was for an XP install that needed SATA drivers. Given that I'm no longer installing XP on machines with special needs, I shouldn't be using them in the future. USB sticks!
 
Not all of us can flash BIOS from windows.

Just sayin'. There's some non-trivial applications for floppies. When I can do BIOS flashes in Linux, I'll give up my last box of floppies.
Click to expand...

Not my intent to do a Burke moment on current events, but you do know that pretty much all recent motherboards have the ability to flash the BIOS via an integral feature of the firmware? All that is needed is a USB flash drive.
 
Last time I would have wanted to use a floppy was about two weeks ago. Needed to install the RAID drivers for this ancient Dell Server we are shipping to a customer. Would have worked nice if there was a floppy drive in it. There wasnt even a floppy channel on the motherboard. I was SOL.
 
I still use floppies almost every week at work. Mostly for RAID installation, BIOS/firmware updates, handy for booting to a DOS environment, and occasionally for ghosting. I would think though that just because Sony isn't making them, there will be some other company that will be making them for quite a while.

I recently got two boxes of them that were getting thrown away, so I would think I'll be good for another few years. :)
 
some places still use floppies, my wife works at an employment center and if someone needs a copy of their resume on the public computers so they can email it off they use floppies to move them from their computers to the public ones since the public ones don't have access to the main network.

The don't use USB drives as her boss is worried someone will infect the public computer with something that will jump to the usb drive then to the main computers that stores personal info on the people that come in.

But really I think this has more to do with third world contries, places where our newer tech is just catching on over there and they are just starting to phase out floppies.
 
Good, floppys need to die already, i haven't had a drive in my computer for about 10 years My last 4 builds have had at least the ability to flash the bios via a cd or even a flash drive. Theres no reason to use a floppy unless your are maybe installing windows xp with third party raid drivers, whatever disks are left over out there should be enough to handle that until
nobody is using that old crap anymore.
 
Yea I have refused to connect a floppy to my computer for many years. I hate those things because I was always loosing data on the store bought ones. I knew some people who actually installed Win95 with a stack of floppies. Good riddance floppy!
 
zeejay said:
Good, floppys need to die already, i haven't had a drive in my computer for about 10 years My last 4 builds have had at least the ability to flash the bios via a cd or even a flash drive. Theres no reason to use a floppy unless your are maybe installing windows xp with third party raid drivers, whatever disks are left over out there should be enough to handle that until
nobody is using that old crap anymore.
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Server 2003 is still being deployed, and it requires drivers off a floppy
 
I repair CNC machines on the side, floppies are essential. I had to repair a 486-100 powered lathe 2 weeks ago, could not have done it without floppies as I had to reinstall dos 6.22 :eek: and copy files from a similar machine. It took me several tries to find a floppy that worked in both machines! I also occassionaly work on machines that have no other source for input of programs than a 720k floppy, try to find those these days!
 
jellisii said:
Not all of us can flash BIOS from windows. ;)

Just sayin'. There's some non-trivial applications for floppies. When I can do BIOS flashes in Linux, I'll give up my last box of floppies.
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Must be an old BIOS without USB support for flashing >_>
 
Ualdayan said:
Sony sold 11.5 million of the 3.5 floppies last year in Japan alone.
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Japan is their only remaining market, according to the article. How much do you think Sony is making off of these things, 50 cents per disk? 10?
jellisii said:
Not all of us can flash BIOS from windows. ;)

Just sayin'. There's some non-trivial applications for floppies. When I can do BIOS flashes in Linux, I'll give up my last box of floppies.
Click to expand...
No USB or CD/DVD? Weak. I had an LS-120 drive once that ran off the Floppy bus. Maybe there's a USB or card reader that does the same thing.
weebling1 said:
You guys need to stop thinking everywhere is on the same tech level as your country. This really means the THIRD WORLD nations are finally done with floppies
Click to expand...
Let them eat CDs!
 
My first build requires a FDD for raid drivers, 8 years old still going strong. Its about the only reason I still keep a spare floppy around.
 
It is possible that Sony is the last manufacturer, but somehow i still see Verbatim and EMTEC floppies in one local shop (Czech Republic & Slovakia). True, pretty much no one uses them, but some do just because legislation still requires them officialy :D.
 
interested said:
The last few times i used a floppy was to provide a AHCI/RAID driver via F6 during a windows xp install, with a factory OEM windows xp with SP3 disk, that did not have intel ICH10R drivers slipstreamed.

Its so stupid that windows xp will only take a AHCI or RAID driver via a floppy drive or via making a slipstreamed disk using nlite.
Really sucks that Microsoft never gave windows xp an update that would allow it to provide the driver via a USB drive like in vista and win7.
Click to expand...

I was going to make this exact comment. Whenever I had to install XP on my 790i board I have to dig up the floppy drive and then track down a disk to put some files on. In addition I have to rename one of the files by changing one of the characters to a lowercase. HUGE pain in the ass.

I've thought about trying to make a copy of the install disk and adding the drivers to the disk in the process but that itself sounds like a pain too.
 
jellisii said:
Not all of us can flash BIOS from windows. ;)

Just sayin'. There's some non-trivial applications for floppies. When I can do BIOS flashes in Linux, I'll give up my last box of floppies.
Click to expand...

Do what I did before Windows flashing was common, make a bootable DOS CD. You can even edit the bootable ISO image so that the firmware update/software is included on the CD. No disk swapping necessary. I never trusted floppies enough to use them for flashing BIOS.
 
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