Floppy drives are no longer needed!

T

trungma

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 12, 2001
Messages
214
I find it funny that readers of an enthusiast site recommends people to put floppy drives in their new system builds. For such a die-hard community of users with the latest and greatest equipment, why install a piece of equipment that is obsolete???

It is no longer needed. A USB thumb drive can do everything a floppy drive can. Most of the new motherboard will emulate the floppy drive using a USB thumb drive. You can make the thumb drive bootable by obtaining a boot image of a regular floppy bootdisk. The boot image can be downloaded so you do not need a floppy drive for that either.

I’ve used my USB thumb drive to load scsi/sata drivers for Windows XP installs, to flash the mobo bios, transfer small files,…etc. I actually hate using the floppy drive to flash a motherboard’s bios, new motherboard bios are often 512kB, Combine that with the flash utility and you’ll have a hard time getting to fit on a regular floppy. Tigerdirect has a 32MB thumb drive for $10 CDN, or about $7 US. At that price, why install a obsolete floppy drive in a kick ass computer?
 
acascianelli said:
what about installing drivers during windows setup...
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Can be done with a USB thumb drive like I mentioned in the original post.
 
trungma said:
Can be done with a USB thumb drive like I mentioned in the original post.
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heh, didnt know that...i tried to load drivers with my usb floppy drive and that didnt work.
 
How is a USB thumbdrive going to help me create a Coyote Linux FD for a P166?

Perhaps if you never have to work with systems from before 2000 you can happily use USB thumbdrives for everything you need, but outside this small world, a FD is often the easiest, if not only way to get things fixed/transferred/configured/whatever quickly.
 
acascianelli said:
heh, didnt know that...i tried to load drivers with my usb floppy drive and that didnt work.
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The motherboard bios must have the option to emulate the floppy drive with USB mass storage devices. Most new boards will have this option, especially the ones the readers of this site buys. Older computers will still need their floppies but older computers are not the reason for the post.

Trung
 
Elledan said:
How is a USB thumbdrive going to help me create a Coyote Linux FD for a P166?

Perhaps if you never have to work with systems from before 2000 you can happily use USB thumbdrives for everything you need, but outside this small world, a FD is often the easiest, if not only way to get things fixed/transferred/configured/whatever quickly.
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Yeah but if we keep on using floppy drives, it's never going to go away. I can see it now. Quantum computers with holographic memory and of couse, the good old floppy drive. :eek:

But again, I'm only referring to new systems. Older systems will always need a floppy drive.

Trung
 
trungma said:
But again, I'm only referring to new systems. Older systems will always need a floppy drive.
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Assuming people buy a mobo with a BIOS that supports booting from USB. You can buy a "new" system that isn't necessarily up-to-date technology.
 
trungma said:
Can be done with a USB thumb drive like I mentioned in the original post.
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Maby when the mfg's start includeing USB thumb drives with the drivers on them... Then there is also the fact that you cant point to anythign but the floppy drive durring an XP install.
 
step out of your nerd world and realize the average home consumer as well as some schools, elementary and college, require floppy's for different documents. In my college classes the professor does the lecture from the front of the room on powerpoint. You can not physically reach behind the computer for USB access because it's locked, so he'll save his presentations on our floppy's. I also work for a law firm that is constantly trading documents on paper with a copy of it on a floppy. These floppy's are always getting lost in transition, so do we really want to get loosing thumb drives every day when we can get a pack of 25 floppy's for a few bucks? Floppy's are what most consumers first experienced so why change it if it ain't broke?

Look, thumb drives are great, I have myself a 256mb one that I use constantly between work school and home. But even though the average [H] browser here may find them obsolete now, somewhere in real life outside of our house, floppy's are being used and almost required. They're louder and slower, but they work for everybody. I built my system with a floppy that I've used once or twice, and that's when my two younger brothers gave me their floppy's to print their paper that they put on it. Do I really want them fiddling around the back of their computer with my USB drive? no. Floppy's work.
 
For the cost of the drive ($5-7.00) and the cost of the media (free - $0.30), I still think floppy's offer a ton of convenience. Still the "lowest common denominator" for most PC's these days.....

JMHO - B.B.S.
 
barefootbilly said:
step out of your nerd world and realize the average home consumer as well as some schools, elementary and college, require floppy's for different documents. In my college classes the professor does the lecture from the front of the room on powerpoint. You can not physically reach behind the computer for USB access because it's locked, so he'll save his presentations on our floppy's. I also work for a law firm that is constantly trading documents on paper with a copy of it on a floppy. These floppy's are always getting lost in transition, so do we really want to get loosing thumb drives every day when we can get a pack of 25 floppy's for a few bucks? Floppy's are what most consumers first experienced so why change it if it ain't broke?

Look, thumb drives are great, I have myself a 256mb one that I use constantly between work school and home. But even though the average [H] browser here may find them obsolete now, somewhere in real life outside of our house, floppy's are being used and almost required. They're louder and slower, but they work for everybody. I built my system with a floppy that I've used once or twice, and that's when my two younger brothers gave me their floppy's to print their paper that they put on it. Do I really want them fiddling around the back of their computer with my USB drive? no. Floppy's work.
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On the other hand, every single computer in my Engineering School (UMD) uses thumb drives b/c of storage space ALONE. He's not storing just a powerpoint presentation on it. He also has HW solutions, new assigments, everything (this is more 10MB easily alone), and b/c our room has a nice projector screen, he runs most of his lectures through the computer.

Ditto with Classics 270. And Project Management. I can go on here--every single professor uses a USB drive.
 
I haven't used a floppy drive since.... since.... I dunno... It's been several years, my computer doesn't have a floppy, I use burned disks, networks, and the internet for file storage/transfer. For me, it works 10,000,000,000 times better than floppy disks
 
Hey I still use floppy drives, I use microsoft word alot and I usually use the floppy disk to back up some of my files. I don't know too many people that would burn a cd for one or two word docs.

I also haven't seen manufactures like 3com for example use a thumb drive for nic drivers yet. Well as long as they make floppy disks and floppy drives, people will continue to use them. They are cheap and don't cost you between $19.00- or higher for the floppy disks.

If I have many files to backup, I will burn a dvd+r or a cdr for my files, but I still use floppies and am too cheap to buy a thumb drive.
 
trungma said:
Quantum computers with holographic memory and of couse, the good old floppy drive. :eek:
Click to expand...

Hey, in Futurama they still use dot-matrix printers... :rolleyes:

A floppy disk is the lowest common denominator for the transfer of information between systems of diverse ages. I still have a 486 and a pentium in the closet that someday I'll use for server / router / firewall purposes. They don't boot from CD, much less a USB flash disk. It's true that I don't use the floppy drive on my box very much, but it doesn't hurt to have it in there.
 
I for one can't get my floppy drive to work, and it pains me at least once a day that I can't do a multitude of things I want to do.

I want to install Slackware linux. How can I do that without a floppy drive?

I want to backup about 1MB of critical data. I had to waste a 700MB CD on it because I have nothing smaller that I can dedicate to archiving purposes.

I needed a windows 2000 Emergency repair diskette the other day. I can't make one, my floppy drive doesn't work.

Such simple things. After awhile they get to nagging on your mind. To this day I don't know why my machine won't read floppies. It sees my floppy drive, but it always tells me I need to "Insert a disk into drive A:" Even when there is one in there. And it frustrates me. And that, above all, is why as a member of a "die-hard community" I still use a floppy drive.

Computers are supposed to be convenient. Not having a floppy drive is the opposite.
 
I have 1 floppy drive that I have lying around "just in case" but I rarely use it. If I ever need anything I just burn a cd. I mean how cheap are those pennies?
 
I dunno what you people are talking about when you say you need it to install xp, please explain. when i install xp I just boot from the cd and thats all thats necessary. Oh and about the whole thing that we should keep them because there practical what I we did the same with 5 1/4 drives? bwahahah that would really suck. Windows, mobo manu, and others should just quit supporting them so that they will finally phase out <die>. I haven't used a floppy in years and I'm ALWAYS using word. I mean man Im in college. Papers every other week! So no I feel they are just old, ugly, and take up space.
 
If you have equipment that the Windows CD doesn't have a driver for, that is necessary for installation (like a disk controller), and your motherboard doesn't pretend that USB flash disks are floppies (must be very modern boards, I don't have any systems that will do this), then you need a floppy disk to load the driver.

As far as installing Slackware, the latest releases actually do boot from CD (one of the CDs can actually function as a sort of emergency recovery live-cd). The entire Slack distribution is still distributed, and can still be installed, as a series of floppy disks though, in order to stay true to it's old-school roots.

Is your floppy drive old? There's varying quality among floppy disk drives... I have one from a Dell less than 2 years old, and it has trouble reading disks, but the drive that always migrates to whatever computer is my main rig (an IBM drive from the very first computer I ever owned, a 486 from 1994!) works flawlessly. I'd try picking up a new drive, they're inexpensive and pretty easy to find. (Dell charges $50 to include one on their systems, though - wtf?)
 
Some very good points in this thread.

Indeed it is true that floppies are becomming obsolete but they havn't quite made it yet. It's kind of like the argument about Casette tapes being obsolete. I know people who still use them because they find them more convenient...

Anyhow. Where I go to college the Profs all use USB thumb drives and i've heard many say they dread the thought of using floppy disks again. Now given the computer systems all have front USB ports and Windows XP. These are the key factos in whether a USB thumb drive is usable in your particular environment.

Additionaly I only have a laptop computer... It has no floppy drive, a USB drive is the perfect solution in this case.

Floppies are on their way out but until these USB flash drives become totally mainstream (they are getting there very quickly) and all motherboard vendors make their motherboards support these as bootable devices (I have not had seuccess booting off my flash drive with my laptop which is about a year old). We are going to be stuck with floppies for a bit longer yet. There are Raid cards etc. that need drivers and durring a windows install it's not usually a good idea to remove the windows CD to insert the CD containing the speial drivers.

We're close but not there yet. I can't wait to see them go. Always that little worry about whether it was going to actually work when you put it in. In highschool I came acoss about 2 computers that ended up coupting my entire floppy disk on me... I gave up on them and started e-mailing files home or if the computer had them, plugging into the USB ports and installing the flash drive drivers from the net (windows 98 machines).
 
yeah mine (which again I havn't used in years) came out of an old packard bell with a 386. I was like 6 when my dad bought the thing but it still works great (which can't be said for the ole' packard) :D
 
I never had data on a floppy get corrupted. One time I laid a magnet on top of one of my disks for about half a day, on purpose of course ;) , and it wouldn't corrupt my data!?! As slow and easy to misplace as they are I guess their reliable :rolleyes:
 
I have a USB flash drive, but I'm not about to turn in my programming assignments on it(nor does my prof want to deal with them). I'm not going to burn a few KB file onto a cd, either. That's for my OO class. For my data structures class, however, the prof has a nice mailserver set up so we just email him our homework and it parses everything out just the way he wants it.
 
DanK said:
If you have equipment that the Windows CD doesn't have a driver for, that is necessary for installation (like a disk controller), and your motherboard doesn't pretend that USB flash disks are floppies (must be very modern boards, I don't have any systems that will do this), then you need a floppy disk to load the driver.

As far as installing Slackware, the latest releases actually do boot from CD (one of the CDs can actually function as a sort of emergency recovery live-cd). The entire Slack distribution is still distributed, and can still be installed, as a series of floppy disks though, in order to stay true to it's old-school roots.

Is your floppy drive old? There's varying quality among floppy disk drives... I have one from a Dell less than 2 years old, and it has trouble reading disks, but the drive that always migrates to whatever computer is my main rig (an IBM drive from the very first computer I ever owned, a 486 from 1994!) works flawlessly. I'd try picking up a new drive, they're inexpensive and pretty easy to find. (Dell charges $50 to include one on their systems, though - wtf?)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the thought, I wasn't actually aware of that information about Slack, thanks! As for the floppy drive, my friends and I have come to the conclusion (and a few people on this board too) that its a dead floppy controller on the motherboard or somesuch. We've tried different cables, different floppy drives, and different floppies, and nothing works.

Oh well, c'est la vie. I don't use this machine for much other than gaming and things of that nature anyways, my linux box has a working FDD. No huge worries, its just a bit upsetting from time to time.

Which is my point, FDDs are so convenient! Why get rid of them when they can solve so much headache? Sure I can set up my BIOS to recognize my USB drive as a bootabel drive, then transfer any data on my thumbdrive over to my HD so it doesn't get lost, then set up my USB drive as a boot disk, etc. etc, but if a floppy drive can do the same by a much simpler process, why not keep using them?
 
reason#1 lack of capacity
reason#2 slow
reason#3 some things just need to be phased out like we did with 5 1/4 drives
 
BlindedByScience said:
For the cost of the drive ($5-7.00) and the cost of the media (free - $0.30), I still think floppy's offer a ton of convenience. Still the "lowest common denominator" for most PC's these days.....

JMHO - B.B.S.
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damn right
 
Canon said:
There are Raid cards etc. that need drivers and durring a windows install it's not usually a good idea to remove the windows CD to insert the CD containing the speial drivers.
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Last time i tried, windows would not let me even point at anything BUT the floppy drive for device controller drivers durring a windows install. Its not that its "not a good idea" its more along the lines of not beign possible unless you want to go thru the trobule of slipstreaming an install before the fact.
 
i still use floppies time to time...not often ya know, but for the extreme cases when i have to do some work at college or something...apparently, the fools in the administration refuse to upgrade hundreds of computers fomr 98 to XP(stability issue...these things just REFUSE to breakdown), and the crap computers to something with a higher clockspeed than my shoe size...thus the reason for the floppies...they are cheap, easy to use, and perfect for something thats only a few kb in size...but thank god for my 256mb mp3/drive....things that are too small for cds, but waaay too big for internet filetransfer or floppies.....mp3 player is the way to go
 
I haven't used a floppy in three days.

I admit to using bootable CDs a lot lately, however.
 
Milez6 said:
reason#1 lack of capacity
reason#2 slow
reason#3 some things just need to be phased out like we did with 5 1/4 drives
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Ignoring that #3 isn't a real reason, isn't it obvious that FDDs simply do what they were designed for, and do it well?

In my experience, there are a million things more which can go wrong with USB drives than with a humble FDD.

I'm curious, though; are the people who advocate getting rid of FDDs mainly young individuals, with no real experience with anything older than Win98 on a P2?
I've been using FDs since the early nineties (on a 286 :p ) and I've never considered USB drives, CD-Rs or any other technology to be a viable replacement.
 
NON -Volatile memory is the biggest reason why Flash drivers are superior. I have stacks of old floppies that has info that has become corrupted with age. Also when it comes to creating Av bootable disks.. Floppies don't have the capacity to handle it. Flash drives can.

Floppy driver supporters are like Bill Gates saying.. 640k is more then enough memory.

Eventually and it is getting their quickly.. Floppys will Vanish and we will be better off for it.
 
Elledan said:
Ignoring that #3 isn't a real reason, isn't it obvious that FDDs simply do what they were designed for, and do it well?

In my experience, there are a million things more which can go wrong with USB drives than with a humble FDD.

I'm curious, though; are the people who advocate getting rid of FDDs mainly young individuals, with no real experience with anything older than Win98 on a P2?
I've been using FDs since the early nineties (on a 286 :p ) and I've never considered USB drives, CD-Rs or any other technology to be a viable replacement.
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Haha I was raised around the time of yellow/black, so I was already 10 or so with 3.1 and 95. Dude, if you remember the beauties of seeing SVGA? Haha, i guess I would somewhere in the middle (old enough to remember my years of P1 + 95). Let's just say that anything and everything goes on the USB stick (projects, essays, midterms, presentations, firefox bookmarks, temp backup for friends, etc.)
 
ReubenRosa said:
NON -Volatile memory is the biggest reason why Flash drivers are superior. I have stacks of old floppies that has info that has become corrupted with age. Also when it comes to creating Av bootable disks.. Floppies don't have the capacity to handle it. Flash drives can.

Floppy driver supporters are like Bill Gates saying.. 640k is more then enough memory.

Eventually and it is getting their quickly.. Floppys will Vanish and we will be better off for it.
Click to expand...
Non-volatile does NOT mean non-corruptable. It simply means that it does not require power to maintain state. It is still possible that things can go wrong, though.

There are many other uses for floppies than antivirus disks. And I don't think anyone is saying that floppies are superior to flash drives or anything like that. Simply, floppies are convenient. You may not have a use for them, but a lot of us do.
 
Astra said:
Is it possible to use memtest86 without floppy drive?
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You should be able to make a bootable cd with memtest. Fuck my hands are cold and I can't type. :mad:
 
I don't see what the big deal is. If there's a demand there's going to be a supply. If people want to use FDs, then good for them. If people don't want to use FDs, then good for them too. Each to their own.

After that being said, I'm going to install a FD on my first build since FD are cheap anyways.
 
The first step in killing floppies is putting a USB port on every keyboard.
This will quadruple the convenience of thumb drives because you don't have to crawl behind your desk, or crouch down to plug in your USB drive. Just pop it in the keyboard and away you go.
 
S1nF1xx said:
The first step in killing floppies is putting a USB port on every keyboard.
This will quadruple the convenience of thumb drives because you don't have to crawl behind your desk, or crouch down to plug in your USB drive. Just pop it in the keyboard and away you go.
Click to expand...

Thats actually a pretty damn good idea... I'd probably have to go out and get a new keyboard if one came out like that.
 
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