To flop, or not to flop?

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Do you still have/use a floppy in your PC?
I recently upgraded to a new case for my HTPC and there is just no room for a floppy drive in it. At first I was bummed, but then it dawned on me, "have I ever actually used the floppy drive on this machine?". I honestly couldn't think of one single time that I had used it.
The new case for the HTPC meant a "new" case for the office PC as well, and when I was transfering all the guts into the new home, I decided to once again forego the floppy.

At first, the HTPC would not boot - at all - without the floppy. Some tinkering in the BIOS got that fixed up though.
Now, both machines P.O.S.T. and boot much faster than they used to.

[SanderMan]

I haven't used a floppy drive for at least 3 years now. It really is an obsolete piece of hardware imo.

[PhoneMatt]

I have one, but have only used it once, recently, as an emergency boot drive, when my HD decided to mess up. Other than that, it's pretty useless, but I would hate to see it go, just from a nostalgia point of view. (C'mon, how much does it cost to include one in a unit?)

[hudsonf]

It's been years since I used a floppy. My wifes computer still has a floppy drive if I ever have the need of one.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

...My wife's computer still has a floppy drive if I ever have the need of one.

ditto
4 PC's in the house.
1 Floppy drive.

[fritzi93]

Yes, just built this computer and it has one. My wife is a teacher and all the district's computers are obsolescent, with floppy drives & CD-ROMs. For working up tests, saving grades, etc, floppies are it. But they're starting to introduce thumb drives.

[yoda313]

Nope. The last computer I had that still had a floppy drive was an old amd athlon 800mhz hp pavillion. When I got my emachine three or four years ago it took me a week or two to realize it didn't have a floppy drive! Since then I haven't seen a need to get one - usb or internal. My new hp amd 64 VISTA pc doesn't have one either. No big loss in my opinion.

HOWEVER I have an old hp laptop that still has a floppy drive so if the need arises I can still copy the data to the laptop and then wifi it to one of my desktops.

[AlanHK]

At first, the HTPC would not boot - at all - without the floppy. Some tinkering in the BIOS got that fixed up though.
Now, both machines P.O.S.T. and boot much faster than they used to.

I've still got the room, so I'll keep mine. I've still got a box of floppies I need to transfer before they rot away....

But as for POST speed: regardless of whether you have a floppy installed, if you just change the BIOS to make the first boot drive your C: drive, and disable floppy seeking, it will boot faster. If you should ever need to boot from a floppy, you can just change the BIOS setting.

[rallynavvie]

In an industry where I still see a silly amount of people carrying files on 3.5" floppies I can safely say they are not dead; but they should be

Seriously, is it just me or have floppies become more vulnerable to data corruption lately? Back in the days I was a Mac Performa user (the last time I used floppies was in the glory days of the 68k) I could "archive" data on a floppy and it was safe as long as it wasn't exposed to a supermagnet. Now it seems just carrying it from your home computer to work will scrub it. I always make it a point to inform those people that floppies are rubbish now, use a USB drive. They have their purpose in an environment where legacy hardware only supports floppy as a boot device, but those are slowly disappearing.

[Tolyngee]

About a month ago I did a clean install of XP on a machine.

It needed the RAID controller drivers to be able to see the array so it could install XP.

The only option it gave me to supply the drivers was the A:\ floppy drive.

Is this really the only option to supply XP with drivers needed at install!?

I mean yikes! There were others drivers I was going to go ahead and give to it at install, but they wouldn't fit on a floppy!

Just when I thought floppy drives were a thing of the past, MS slaps me in the face with this!

Hope Vista isn't the same...

[CrayonEater]

I haven't used one in years except to try to recover some old 1.44s dating from the early 90's. The 1.44 disk is very unreliable, and I was never a fan of them to begin with. I still have some surviving 1.2Ms and a drive for them.

That said, the floppy itself is probably the most obsolete component which still can be commonly found on recent machines. I have one in my main rig only because it also serves as my flash card reader.

From a performance perspective, having the floppy in the boot order will substantially reduce boot time. However, most BIOSes allow you to set the boot order to exclude the floppy; unless you need to boot from a floppy, leave it out and have a CD-first, HDD-second boot order.

XP's one downside is that it does expect RAID drivers on a floppy, the main reason being that your CD drive is occupied by your XP installation disc. I'd think Vista would have the same problem, unless you had multiple CD/DVD drives.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

About a month ago I did a clean install of XP on a machine.

It needed the RAID controller drivers to be able to see the array so it could install XP...

I have a PCI/IDE card that will require the same thing if I ever need to re-install Windows....
DAMMIT!

Oh well, at least I kept one of the floppy drives in a box somewhere.

[edDV]

I move a floppy around when I need to flash a bios.

[redwudz]

I haven't installed or used them in a couple of years. I do have a USB powered floppy drive that came with my laptop. It boots with most any computer as the 'A' drive. I use that for the occasional program that needs a floppy.

I have lots of USB thumb drives that I use in place of floppies for small files.

I also have several ZIP drives that I have now retired.

[edDV]

Funny that a floppy now costs about 35cents, about the same as a DVDR blank.

[oldandinthe way]

We keep a USB floppy about for updating older software and for reading pictures taken by our old SONY Mavica camera. It has a 16x optical zoom and is still great for photos for our web pages.

[ozymango]

Got an Hitachi USB floppy drive that was thirty bucks, it's great for two things at work:

1) Booting a computer/creating a boot disk for special builds, network remote boot when PXE won't bite, that sorta thing.

2) When installing XP from scratch on some newer SATA computers, drive is recognized by the XP boot CD as a store for RAID/SATA drivers (downloaded from vendor site). XP only recognizes a couple of different USB floppy drives when you boot from CD, and the Hitachi is one of 'em.

We need a floppy drive about half a dozen times a year, but when we need it, it can save us hours of work so it's a cheap investment.

[SLK001]

I have both a 1.44MB and 1.2MB floppy on one of my machines. I have a 1.44MB floppy on ALL of my machines. I don't use them often, but when they are needed, they are worth their weight in gold.

[tekkieman]

While I think they are obsolete, I'm not sure they should be. I think they would still be very useful in education. It's been a few years since I left college, but I certainly recall having to turn in applications and source code.

In that situation, a thumb drive doesn't really cut it, as I know I would not want to relinquish any of mine, so that leaves CDs and DVDs. Now, you're forced into either a large quantity, or multi-sessions or re-writable.

Not a huge inconvenience, but why force students into it?

[ozymango]

In that situation, a thumb drive doesn't really cut it, as I know I would not want to relinquish any of mine, so that leaves CDs and DVDs. Now, you're forced into either a large quantity, or multi-sessions or re-writable.

Yeah, it's weird because, in actual use, a blank CD is cheaper than a blank floppy -- but I hate burning a CD with only 1 meg of data! It just seems ... wasteful? All that space not being used, I feel I might as well include a couple of songs or something, there's plenty of room.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I use a floppy when I have to do a clean install which is very rare...or .txt and .doc files for work.
I bought a USB floppy drive to use on PC's that don't have one:
http://hexparts.3dcartstores.com/Toshiba-35-External-Floppy-USB-Disk-Drive_p_27-114.html

[Epicurus8a]

We still have them at work - just in case the network goes down. But nobody remembers or knows how to use them.

[rallynavvie]

In that situation, a thumb drive doesn't really cut it, as I know I would not want to relinquish any of mine, so that leaves CDs and DVDs. Now, you're forced into either a large quantity, or multi-sessions or re-writable.

Those things are getting so cheap these days that you can find small ones, 256MB for instance, for a few bucks or even free. I've also seen high school teachers batch-ordering small ones to hand out to students for just this reason. USB drives really do seem to be the universal storage format for now seeing how ubiquitous they are.

[tekkieman]

In that situation, a thumb drive doesn't really cut it, as I know I would not want to relinquish any of mine, so that leaves CDs and DVDs. Now, you're forced into either a large quantity, or multi-sessions or re-writable.

Those things are getting so cheap these days that you can find small ones, 256MB for instance, for a few bucks or even free. I've also seen high school teachers batch-ordering small ones to hand out to students for just this reason. USB drives really do seem to be the universal storage format for now seeing how ubiquitous they are.

Interesting, but still a little tougher to label than a floppy...