3.5" Floppy Drives? Does anyone else use them? [Archive]

RiceMonster

July 7th, 2009, 02:19 PM

Last I saw anybody use one was my frist two years of highschool. I remember my friend bringing his project in on one, asking if he could print it off, then saying it was damaged (which it wasn't, he just didn't do it). Don't have a floppy drive on any of my computers.

Skripka

July 7th, 2009, 02:20 PM

Last I used or tried to use one was on my 1st laptop 7 years ago....all I tried to do was make a boot disk-to no avail. I'm surprised that mainboards still even have headers for floppy drives.

jespdj

July 7th, 2009, 02:26 PM

Diskettes are totally obsolete. A 3.5" diskette only holds 1.44 MB, which is almost nothing nowadays. I haven't used them for years, and I don't even have a computer anymore which has a diskette drive.

I don't even need them for installing BIOS updates, because the BIOS in my computers can do it from an USB memory stick. If I need a rescue disk, I just use a Linux live CD.

infestor

July 7th, 2009, 03:52 PM

last time i used one was 5 yrs ago...the damn oscilloscope didnt have a USB port :|

Muffinabus

July 7th, 2009, 04:08 PM

I built my current machine with one, but have not once ever used it. That was 5 years ago.

The Real Dave

July 7th, 2009, 04:45 PM

All of my computers (bar the laptop, server and media centre) have a floppy drive. I've a box with about 25 of em, taken from older computers. I don't really know why I keep them, the biggest use I've found for them recently is either tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/) or stripping the drives for motors. Still, nice to have them in case you ever need one.

kevdog

July 7th, 2009, 04:52 PM

Seems like I might be showing my age here. Definitely a different generation when floppy drives were king! Hell I remember booting my Apple IIGS off 5.25 floppy drives. You talk about slow!

Muffinabus

July 7th, 2009, 05:00 PM

liamnixon

July 7th, 2009, 05:10 PM

Still got a few old DOS games on floppy that I play periodically, but I copied them onto my drive so I can use DOSBox to play them with instead. I still think they're nice to have around, though. Reminds of the Macs in my elementary school computer lab. ;)

Firestem4

July 7th, 2009, 05:13 PM

Diskettes are totally obsolete. A 3.5" diskette only holds 1.44 MB, which is almost nothing nowadays. I haven't used them for years, and I don't even have a computer anymore which has a diskette drive.

Agreed. Anything you needed diskettes for you can now do with USB thumb drives just as easily with a lot more storage. (And, everybody has a USB port too)

I don't even need them for installing BIOS updates, because the BIOS in my computers can do it from an USB memory stick. If I need a rescue disk, I just use a Linux live CD.

Although, my last two mobo's didn't even need to use a thumb drive to flash the bios. The installer would load it into the ROM during installation.

My new Gigabyte mobo can even back up my BIOS/CMOS settings to my hard-drive.

blueturtl

July 7th, 2009, 05:14 PM

I have 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk readers in my main comp. Granted, it's a really old rig but I don't actually use them all that much. They're there just in case.

The former is old enough to have the capacity printed on it "1.44 MB" (Remember when there were 720 KB floppies and drives?) and the other I guess is a top-of-the-line 1.2 MB model. I friend of mine was going to throw away a bunch of those and I asked to keep one just for the novelty of it.

I'm not quite old enough to have used a system without a hard-disk, but floppy disks were a very integral part of computing for a very long period of time even after bigger storage came along.

Ridiculously, a lot of necessary drivers and BIOS updates even today are only readily available as floppy disks or -disk images.

Ironically I've had more trouble with USB memory than I ever did with floppies. I know floppies are not the most reliable media, but I never had issues keeping data on them. Some old floppies I got still read and write just fine and I've even carried some around in my coat pockets completely unprotected.

L.J

July 7th, 2009, 05:15 PM

dfreer

July 7th, 2009, 05:33 PM

Agreed. Anything you needed diskettes for you can now do with USB thumb drives just as easily with a lot more storage. (And, everybody has a USB port too)

Except if you want to install Windows XP with RAID. Unless you want to customize the install disc and slipstream the drivers in, floppies are the only way to go.

Not really needed anymore for modern linux distros though, I agree.

JillSwift

July 7th, 2009, 06:30 PM

I have a 3.5" floppy drive.

It's holding up the front of my window-mounted air conditioner. :D

nowin4me

July 7th, 2009, 07:05 PM

To be frank, nope I have never used a floppy since 2003. Although i do keep a usb attachable floppy drive just in case i need it, personally i think they are really old school and wayyy out dated, they just lack everything the CD/DVD has.... what can you do with floppy's that you can't CD's ?? I can't think of nuthin...

USB attachable floppy drive? What's the point? You could put one of those's USB flash drives in instead of your floppy drive(or what ever they call them).

EDIT: I don't have a floppy drive in my PC because my motherboard doesn't support them.
The last time I used a floppy drive was about a year ago at college.

KegHead

July 7th, 2009, 07:08 PM

ten years ago

LowSky

July 7th, 2009, 07:28 PM

haven used one in years... usb flash drives have completely replaced them

b@sh_n3rd

July 7th, 2009, 07:30 PM

Can't remember when I stopped but all 6 PC's here at home have a floppy drive but I don't use em...Well, if I did wanna use em I'd have trouble hunting for a floppy disk in the first place! :D...My PC's are rather old but I do need a floppy to upgrade the BIOS if I really do need it...

lukeiamyourfather

July 7th, 2009, 07:35 PM

The last time I used a floppy disk was about six months ago to update the motherboard BIOS on an older system. For anything that can boot with a USB devices just use a flash drive and make it bootable. If you're building a new system though there's really no point to adding a floppy drive since it'll be able to boot from USB devices. Cheers!

donkyhotay

July 7th, 2009, 07:41 PM

Haven't used one since win3.1/DOS. Last system I had with one came with win95 and even then I never used it.

doorknob60

July 7th, 2009, 08:45 PM

I still got floppies of Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 lying around somewhere :D Actually some of them are right in front of me (don't know how they got there). My vomputer has a floppy drive, but I haven't really used it. Dunno if it works. Actually I used it maybe a year ago to get my craptop to boot off USB or something.

kerry_s

July 7th, 2009, 08:56 PM

whats a floppy drive ? :lolflag:

no, i don't use them any more. i haven't even bothered to put a cd drive in my new pc yet, since most of the time i'm using thumb drives.

Blacklightbulb

July 7th, 2009, 09:04 PM

I actually had this friend who had a lot of information on floppies and her floppy drive somehow broke down somehow. So I offered to burn them to a CD on my desktop but she refused for some reason:confused:?!

So I offered to give her mine (which I didn't use for more than 5 years now). She agreed an I removed my floppy drive and attached it to her Desktop for 30$ buck;)

HappyFeet

July 7th, 2009, 09:09 PM

Maybe I'm just a dinosaur.

Exactly.

blur xc

July 7th, 2009, 09:15 PM

Seems like I might be showing my age here. Definitely a different generation when floppy drives were king! Hell I remember booting my Apple IIGS off 5.25 floppy drives. You talk about slow!

In jr high we had a computer lab consisting of banks of Apple IIe's running off of a SINGLE 5.24" floppy drive; like one row of computers per drive... That was slow.

Class was almost over before all the kids got booted up.

Yeah, my new pc doesn't have a drive anymore. Ever once in a while I find a 3.5" floppy in the garage and wonder what might be on it.

funny stuff...

Just ONE cRAW image from my sony A700 dslr is ~12 - 13mb...

BM

MikeTheC

July 7th, 2009, 09:24 PM

I first moved off of floppies in 1995. At the time I thought the then-brand-new SyQuest EZ-135 cartridge drive would be all the rage. I imaged all of my floppies and put them on about five SyQuest cartridges. My misjudgment was not that floppies were on the way out, but rather what it was that was going to replace them.

Anyhow, to make a long and uninteresting story short, after "downsizing" from bunches of floppies, I then started to grow a collection (nowhere near the same size, of course) of SyQuest cartridges. Of course, it didn't last because SyQuest failed to catch a hold of the next wave of computer users wanting data portability, and the market went to Iomega's ZIP 100 system, which of course then I needed to get. After then transferring all the images to ZIP discs, I kept them there for quite a while.

Then the prices on CD-R drives (at the time, CD-R and CD-RW were two separate types of drives) came down, and of course blank media became cheaper and cheaper, so then I transferred everything to CD.

Anyhow, so to answer the question in this thread, no, I no longer use 3.5" floppy drives or disks, and haven't now in about 14 years.

wirepuller134

July 8th, 2009, 01:43 AM

We use them in the field quite a bit, several older manufacturers only used floppies on their equipment. PACMAC still uses a floppy on theirs with DOS. So to answer the question, yes we still use them quite frequently, when working on other manufacturer's equipment.

swoll1980

July 8th, 2009, 01:49 AM

I've got a 5.25" drive in my closet.

MikeTheC

July 8th, 2009, 04:12 AM

I've got a 5.25" drive in my closet.
And here I thought you were just happy to see us. :shock: :p

swoll1980

July 8th, 2009, 04:20 AM

And here I thought you were just happy to see us. :shock: :p

No comment. :oops:

kevdog

July 8th, 2009, 07:02 PM

And here I thought you were just happy to see us. :shock: :p

Ouch.

benj1

July 8th, 2009, 07:30 PM

for some reason i just dont feel that a desktop pc isn't complete without a floppy drive, even though i don't use them anymore.
they were great back in the day they would never break or scratch, and you could guarantee that every pc would have a drive, ive got a 9gb usb stick now, whats that 6000 floppies?

clonne4crw

July 30th, 2009, 11:42 PM

I still use them for software development!

kingjere

July 30th, 2009, 11:58 PM

I was trying to find an old file I had in a box of thirty or so floppies. I went to my local used computer store and asked if they had any usb foloppy drives. "Yes", he said. "Fifteen dollars." I didn't even bother. Supply and demand I guess.

MikeTheC

July 31st, 2009, 12:04 AM

Oh my God, is this thread still alive?

Anyone who is still using a floppy drive in a serious way these days is just... I dunno... grow up already and get with the times! :)

Bezmotivnik

July 31st, 2009, 03:20 AM

Diskettes are totally obsolete.
Not only that, but they've lost their format and data by now. :(

All mine have. Decades of archives...GONE.

lisati

July 31st, 2009, 03:25 AM

I have a USB 3.5" floppy drive for use with my laptop and "good" desktop, my older desktop has one builtin which I've occasionally used when the BIOS boot from CD hasn't worked and for Win98SE recovery disk. Sitting in a cupboard somewhere I have a couple of 5.25" drives salvaged from now-scrapped machines, one of which I had in my old desktop for a while.

Gathering dust upstairs I have a pile of 5.25" disks for a couple of Commodore 128s that are also gathering dust.

Many years ago I saw a PC with an 8" floppy drive but I never got to use it.

sdlynx

July 31st, 2009, 04:06 AM

haha last time I used one of these was a year or two ago, just cuz I had the drive on my desktop. Then I got a new graphics card and it needed auxilary power, so goodbye floppy port.

r4z0r_bl4d3

July 31st, 2009, 05:57 AM

Floppies are LEGACY. The only time you need to use them is on legacy hardware.

I do run into peoples older laptops that are still kicking around, which have floppy drives in them, but the cd drive doesn't work, and it can't boot from usb. In those situations floppies are helpful.

When I salvage old desktops, i remove the floppy drive, but can't bring myself to throw them away.

It is the same with 56k modems. I know I will never use them, but I just can't throw them away. I have about 7 modems and about 8 floppy drives.

Does anyone have ideas to re purpose old 56k modems?

ericab

July 31st, 2009, 06:36 AM

umm.. sign up for a dialup service ?

Sepanderi

July 31st, 2009, 06:40 AM

last time i used one was 5 yrs ago...the damn oscilloscope didnt have a USB port :|

Yea, last time I used a floppy was with an ancient oscilloscope. Eventually it resulted in getting half of my screenshots corrupted. :-x

Sublime Porte

July 31st, 2009, 08:48 AM

Call me old school, however whenever I still build a system I include one

I haven't used one in many many years. Even when they were fairly standard I still rarely used them, as they were just so small and once bootable CD's became fairly commonplace, floppy's were just obsolete, as that was their laast actual use (booting from). I've been using bootable CD's (for recovery, installing, ghosting etc) for about 9-10 years now, so haven't used a fdd in all that time really. None of my computers have them, and the last computer I bought with one in it (a second hand ex-corporate PC), the first thing I did was rip the useless thing out and replace it with a card reader.

Can't break away from the old win98 recovery disc which seems quite useful in some situations.

Bootable CD's made floppies completely obsolete in my opinion. And who on earth would use a Win98 recovery disc? It's so useless, has very few diagnostic tools, can't even handle USB or filesystems other than FAT. Who would boot into a crippled DOS prompt, when you could boot into a full Linux Desktop with every single recovery tool you could imagine. You really need to checkout Parted Magic (http://partedmagic.com) or some other decent system recovery tools. Or Bart's PE if you must have a Microsoft based environment.

Maybe I'm just a dinosaur

Nope, just a Luddite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite) by the sounds of it.

lisati

July 31st, 2009, 08:52 AM

Does anyone have ideas to re purpose old 56k modems?

Good question: I have one sitting around somewhere gathering dust that I pulled out of my old desktop so that I could put in an ethernet card (or was it USB? I had to pull out both the modem and the soundcard to put in ethernet and USB) And I have a spare internal 3.5" floppy drive that I purchased several years ago for a now scrapped machine and never got round to installing (forgot to get the proper mounting bracket!)

jomiolto

July 31st, 2009, 10:46 AM

Bootable CD's made floppies completely obsolete in my opinion.

I never liked bootable CDs too much (I don't like burning CDs), but bootable USB drives are great.

For me it was cheap USB drives that really made floppies obsolete. Now if only we could get rid of hard disks and optical drives, and be completely rid of mechanical storage devices :p

mmix

July 31st, 2009, 12:05 PM

3.5" FDD: 2
5.25" FDD: 0, dumped about 14 years ago

HappinessNow

July 31st, 2009, 01:28 PM

Call me old school, however whenever I still build a system I include one -- my current favorite is a floppy/6:1 card reader. Can't break away from the old win98 recovery disc which seems quite useful in some situations. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur.
Have a floppy drive on my desktop, but I never use it.

KegHead

July 31st, 2009, 01:30 PM

it's been about 10 years.

magnus0

July 31st, 2009, 01:31 PM

I've never used a floppy :D

t0p

July 31st, 2009, 01:48 PM

Many years ago I saw a PC with an 8" floppy drive but I never got to use it.

An 8 inch floppy? Surely it'd be hard at that length?

:p

angry_johnnie

July 31st, 2009, 02:44 PM

Of course!

How else would I install this (http://ms-dos7.hit.bg/index.htm)? ok there is a cd image, but it just doesn't feel "right," you know... :)

The bad thing is 3.5" floppies are kinda hard to find nowadays, and they don't really last all that long. Floppies have an irritating tendency to die for just about anything, which is probably the reason most people don't like them any more.

init1

July 31st, 2009, 03:42 PM

My old laptop has a floppy drive in the modular bay, since the CD drive broke. It's still useful for installing DOS :D

MasterNetra

July 31st, 2009, 03:57 PM

Diskettes are totally obsolete. A 3.5" diskette only holds 1.44 MB, which is almost nothing nowadays. ...

You cans till use then transfer documents! I don't really use them myself anymore. My desktop though has a floppy drive. The system started with 512 ram (I upgraded to 768 and can be upgraded to 1GB), 1 128mb graphics card, Intel Pentium 4, and 40GB Hard drive.

nsche

August 13th, 2009, 06:34 PM

You have not had fun until you have installed Linux (SLS I think it was) from about 50 floppys.

lukjad

August 13th, 2009, 06:50 PM

I haven't used Floppies for a few months, but I still think there may be a small market for them.

hessiess

August 13th, 2009, 06:55 PM

Floppies are obsolete, relapsed by USB flash media. Optical media is basically obsolite as well, thanks to the internet.

HappyFeet

August 13th, 2009, 06:58 PM

Have not used floppies in years, and have no desire to do so.

lisati

August 13th, 2009, 07:01 PM

An 8 inch floppy? Surely it'd be hard at that length?

:p
:)

Floppies are obsolete, relapsed by USB flash media. Optical media is basically obsolite as well, thanks to the internet.
blu-ray? I still occasionally hear people refer to DVDs as CDs.....

pricetech

August 13th, 2009, 07:50 PM

I occasionally smoke old floppies to get high. Other than that I don't have much use for them.

cmay

August 13th, 2009, 08:04 PM

i found a bunch of floppies on sale that i hurried up to get . they are not even unpacked yet and i have 3 hundred in 3 boxes of hundred each. so i plan on once i get my minix and FreeDos computer up and running and i start to invest some time in it again to actually use floppies. i might as well now when i got them .

nitehawk777

August 13th, 2009, 08:52 PM

Got a bunch of old floppies laying around. But I actually use one as a "boot floppy" for Puppy Linux. One of my rigs has a 160G hard-drive that I dual-boot wXP and Debian Lenny with. The second 40G hard-drive runs Puppy 4.2.1. Just seemed easier for me to do it that way ("Old-School", I guess).....

Mehall

August 13th, 2009, 10:54 PM

i have the debian boot, root, and network 1 and 2 floppies. i used them once to prove an old system was stil working.

Torgas Prim

August 13th, 2009, 10:57 PM

Doh! Threw them things and the drives out a few years back.
Haven't missed them :guitar:

WindowlessHouse

April 6th, 2010, 04:22 AM

Occasionally I still need to be able to transfer files from a DOS machine that has no internet connection, no USB, no SD-card drive, etc.. These files are usually only a few K each, so I could probably put over 100 on one floppy. The floppy-disc drive is the ONLY thing I have trouble with in Ubuntu!

Yvan300

April 6th, 2010, 04:57 AM

Yes you are a dinosaur indeed!

Khakilang

April 6th, 2010, 05:02 AM

I see some of my customer still using floppy disk for their document. Quite handy when there is an hard disk or Window crash. You can boot up from floppy and do a system check.

But for me personally I don't use it for almost 3 years now an nowadays most computer can boot up from USB thumb drive so no floppy for me.

bpalone

April 6th, 2010, 05:06 AM

Well add another dinosaur to the list, as I just recently bought two NEW 3.5s and still have some 5.25s with data on them. I have a functioning 5.25 in an old 95 or 98 machine, that I have used to transfer files to 3.5s so I could get at the data. I remember when 5.25s were single sided.

In fact I am still making money from a database program I wrote in BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I. Not from the program itself, but from results generated because of it.

I still have an old Amstrad that only has 3.5s.

So, I guess call me old.

Crunchy the Headcrab

April 6th, 2010, 05:09 AM

My dad still has a functioning 486 with a 5.25 drive that works. I think it's the original drive!

gadolinio

April 6th, 2010, 06:22 AM

I use them rarely, just for fun. I have both 3,5 and 5,25 drives in my computer... and right there you can see 4 usb ports :O It's a nice picture...
After learning how to use fdisk, 3,5 diskettes became a useful tool. I also have memories of the 5,25-inch floppy.

gadolinio

April 6th, 2010, 06:26 AM