floppies

[dedndave]

i don't doubt that floppies are a thing of the past
just that i have so much stuff on floppies
i don't feel like spending the time to move it all
i have a little 8 Gb thumb drive that i can use to move things from machine to machine, now

[clive]

Floppy is slow, it only read 1 sector per second.

Floppies usually read at a rate of approx. 30Kilobytes per second (lowest) upto 200Kilobytes per second (fastest).

This means about 60 to 400 sectors per second

One sector a second is just a stupid number. What are you using, a Commodore 64!

HD 1.44MB floppy, 18 sectors per track, 2 heads, 300 rpm (5 rotations per second). If you are lucky you could read both sides, step to another track and read both side of it in one second. Say 72 sectors, or 36KB/s. For a 2X drive, or a 2.88MB floppy 72KB/s, for a 720KB floppy 18 KB/s.

-Clive

[shankle]

That seem to be the way with everything.
Somebody that has to justify his pay check comes up with another stupid idea
to make the boss money.
It happens with printers, digital cameras, computers etc.. Obsoleted by the time you
get used to them and they are still in good condition.

IMHO what's needed is phase out period of about 10 years, where they still will
support their products.

[Farabi]

Floppy is slow, it only read 1 sector per second.

Floppies usually read at a rate of approx. 30Kilobytes per second (lowest) upto 200Kilobytes per second (fastest).

This means about 60 to 400 sectors per second

One sector a second is just a stupid number. What are you using, a Commodore 64!

HD 1.44MB floppy, 18 sectors per track, 2 heads, 300 rpm (5 rotations per second). If you are lucky you could read both sides, step to another track and read both side of it in one second. Say 72 sectors, or 36KB/s. For a 2X drive, or a 2.88MB floppy 72KB/s, for a 720KB floppy 18 KB/s.

-Clive

Dunno, maybe I miss remember it.

[Farabi]

TOday, you dont need floppy or CD to transfer data between 2 machines, why not using wifi and LAN cable?
Wifi is 56 MB and LAN is 100MB each second.

[dedndave]

oh - i know Onan
i have a couple old machines that are not connected to the internet
it is hard to find a wireless card for old win 98 machines
i do have NIC cards and i can use an ethernet cable if i get desperate
i can also put the old drives in my new machine by using the IDE cables from the optical drives if i need to move a lot of large files
but - the 8 Gb thumb drive is fine for most things
i hardly ever turn those machines on anymore - no time to play   :P

[rags]

Another thing to consider, I've have floppies "go bad" for no apparent reason.
I wrote to them once, put them away safely until needed again, then a year or so later went to retrieve the files and the
disk was unreadable.

[sinsi]

TOday, you dont need floppy or CD to transfer data between 2 machines, why not using wifi and LAN cable?
Wifi is 56 MB and LAN is 100MB each second.

Wireless is 54 megabits/sec, when the overhead is taken into account it's about 5 megabytes/sec, very slow for transferring gigabytes.
I always hook up a cat5 cable since my computers here all have gigabit ethernet - 100 megabytes/sec is worth the hassle  :bg

One thing I have found with floppies, as soon as another computer writes to one it's unusable. If my computer is the only one to write to it, it's ok, every other one can read it.
I had to put a floppy drive in my computer because it is impossible to transfer stuff to a DOS virtual machine (with vmware/virtualpc)  :(

[Magnum]

Went up on the Dell and HP sites and I was unable to find a puter that advertised a floppy drive.
To me there is a need for very large storage and rather small storage. I use floppies for very
small storage. So now, (if I am correct) I will have to use a 6G stick to move a file of 10k.

Why would you want to use a "turtle slow" floppy instead of a USB stick?
I still have a floppy drive, but don't use it.

I have one for sale if you want one.

Andy

[BlackVortex]

In DOS days I used to write everything in flopppies twice. I mean to 2 floppies, because they kept breaking down. My father had a whole stash of that crap.

Also, floppies are crap and they deserve to die a horrible death. But so are cd/dvds, getting scratched all the time, unless you babysit them.

[hutch--]

sinsi,

I am waiting for computers to catch up to cat6 cable, I have a 300 metre roll as a footstool. I used about 5 to 10 metres to do all of my networking and the rest waits until I can find a use for it. You really do appreciate a gigabit network when you are backing up whole machines across a network.

Since its easy enough to put multiple 1 gigabit ethernet cards into computers, I wonder if anyone has ever done multiple connections to the same machine to get the speed up ? The fastest data transfer I can get over an ethernet connection is an A0E eternal hard disk I have wired up that is about 40% faster than from another computer.

[xanatose]

As a backup, I will never miss floppies. They where a pain in the but, specially when disk #16 of a 20 disk installation had a bad sector :)

[SqueakyClean]

Seeing this is my very first post, it is soooo fitting to be about floppies. I still have a machine with a really old 5.25 floppy in it. Part of my customer base is in industrial automation and there are still Allen Bradley NC machines around with large floppies as the program input source. Some even have bubble memory modules to store the programs internally. I only use them for these customers and no others. One old maintenance supervisor told me that the phrase DOA was actually coined by IBM to mean, DISK OFF AGAIN, 'nuff said.

[locche]

Floppies are certainly outdated, but they've help me out a myriad of times.  I found this old Compaq III, which has a 5 1.2 " floppy drive. The machine had been in a cellar so long it required the setup program from Compaq. This I found in the internet. I took me about half a year to find the appropriate floppies,( outside an experimental lab by the university, where I also got found this neat Epson Lx800 dot matrix, for which you can still buy ribbon cartridges from Epson direct ). After installing a 5 1/2 drive from an old 486 ( experimental lab again ) on my pentium I, I finally got to test out copy A: B: command and give the Compaq the kiss of life. There are so many treasures in the dustbins of progress to be had.  I like old hardware because it runs on good software. Anyway with time everything goes to dust. Today's technology is tomorrow's old crap.  Just like people. I still remember the day I realised the 3 day beard was no longer sexy but grey. Sure anyone with memories of a 23 disk install of Os2 or Win 95 ( reformatting floppies to 1.8 ...) is apt to growl when approached with the subject. I understand. But in a hobbyist kind of way, you can learn a lot recapitulating history. Devices are simpler, and they do what you tell them to do. In maybe five years time you'll flick a light switch, and the light will react by say something to the effect: " Hey Locche, using too much electricity is bad for the environment. Don't you want to reconsider?" or you'll have a sensor in the toilet that switches on "Hey Locche, you've been in here an awful long time, your wife wanted you to take here shopping!", etc.. Ahem! This is the orphanage not wafflage. But floppies, yessir, 2 bags full!

[dedndave]

i use the beard to hide part of my face
may not be "sexy", but it's still an improvement
every little bit helps, you know   :P