A Nerdly Amusement

[coyotewolfen]

It just ocurred to me that at a time when floppy are no longer included as standard with new computers, and are generally considered useless, I have tested more floppy drives since I started working here, than processors from either Intel or AMD, digital cameras, laptop RAM, KVM switches, wireless network adapters, I/O controller cards, and

Comments

[coyotewolfen]

Well its not like these things have lifetime warranties. These are new drives too, as are their replacements. I've probalby tested more floppies than I think, and most of those I've tested are ones coming back that I have to verify, and then they go into stock, not to the customer. THey may get used in systems where there is a requirement for a floppy drive (ie: schools), and there are still a lot of modern cases available that aaccomodate the floppy.

Buy and A8 series board and you might just find you need that floppy drive. THey and other older boards like it that using SATA chipsets that don't have drivers included with the OS install must be installed at that time, from floppy, to continue with a problem installation, if being installed to a SATA drive. If you ever need to do a BIOS update, the most reliable method is via floppy. Even if the general public has sworn off floppies 5 years ago, we'll liekly still be using floppies 5 years from now in service. Much like I expect to be seeing XP for the next 5 years.

[dan_raccoon]

I remember when I first started looking for laptops I had a rough time because so few were coming with floppy drives at that point. It was not until I discovered flash drives that I made the big switch for portable storage, but if they hadn't come along, I probably never would have found any computer that met my needs.

Floppy disks may be endangered now, but they're still great and reliable. Long live the 1.44 mb storage medium! :)

[coyotewolfen]

They're not THAT reliable! I've probably tossed about a half dozen disks since starting work and all they di is sit in a closed toolbox I use as a foodrest. All I'd have to do is pass one of our weakly magnetized screwdrivers across the surface of one of them and your data is totally boned! Solid state media is in every way an improvement.

CompactFlash and SecureDigital would have become the new floppies (they already pre-dated memory keys), and a lot of the HP laptops came/come with SD card readers built in. If it was getting harder and harder to find a laptop with a built-in floppy, its because alternatives were on the rise, and floppy drives are wasted bulk. We have a USB floppy drive at work for use with laptops where a floppy is need (ie: diagnostics, Ghost, BIOS updates). Someo f the ultralight laptops don't even have internal floppy drives for much the same reason.

[redvixen]

*chuckles* I don't usually comment on your spelling mistakes but I like the fact that you're suing the 1.44MB magnetic storage media for maintenance needs. What are you asking for a settlement?

[coyotewolfen]

To rectify the blatant inconvenience they cause to my life, I figure a 4GB SD card and a 50-pack of DVD-R's would be sufficient. I'm not /that/ greedy and heartless! Without the floppy I couldn't have played Cribbage in DOS in our test lab during off hours! Nor make our external parallel CD ROM drives accessible for CD-based Win98 installs. Nor do half a dozen other useful things to help me through my college studies. Funny though. While my diploma is all but useless prfessionally speaking, floppies will be used here in Service for many years to come.

They have SD cards now with USB connectors on them for use on computers that lack a card reader. Vista has a little feature in it that will give the user a performance boost if they have a thumbdrive connected. Even so, I wonder if flash-based media, and USB for that matter, will carry the same legacy as the floppy drive. USB has been around for 10 years, but floppy, going as far back as the 8" Xerox soft floppies go back probably 30 years.

[lupine52]

The floppy drive still is useful for making boot disks so not entirely obsolete.

Granted you can set the bios to read to CD rom first but if you have to restart after a format /s it sure is nice to have a floppy drive to run that boot disk program.

[coyotewolfen]

To a point. The only thing we absolutely require a boot floppy for is for BIOS updates. Ghost can be booted from CD. Our HDD diagnostic utilities can be run from CD. If you want to format a drive for OS installation, your best best is via Windows setup, otherwise why not format in Windows? You can run format commands on any drive that is not a system or boot drive from within Windows.