7 ms·

Why the Floppy Disk Is Still Used Today

97 points by bowyakka 11y ago

Namrog84 11y ago
I liked this story. I still have a few floppies in storage as mementos of times long since past. Maybe I'll consider sending in to make them useful for someone somewhere else.
- stinos 11y ago
  I have a 'picture wall' at our house and in between the pictures with good memories I also put some floppy disks (and cassettes). Looks nice in my opinion and reminds me of those times when taking a picture was still somewhat special, and the output was something to be kept, whereas now in the majority of cases it seems pictures are taken to be looked at once and then forgotten for eternity.
  - kqr 11y ago
    There are still some of us crazies around who take photos on film and create prints ourselves in a bathroom-turned-darkroom in our homes. Definitely gives more weight to each picture when the turnaround is weeks, and each picture requires hours of physical work.
- jzzskijj 11y ago
  I still have a good collection of Atari ST demos on floppies. Even managed to find a working floppy drive (had to try three different drives) for a PC to write some recent demoscene productions (2010-2015) on floppies.
  - kaybe 11y ago
    If it ever stops working - I basically fixed mine by opening it and vacuuming inside.
tragomaskhalos 11y ago
It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if the parallel innovations of CD and internet had not sidelined the floppy, since software was already outgrowing them : the last version of Visual C++ that I installed from floppies came on IIRC several dozen disks, requiring the thing to be carried in a couple of sturdy carrier bags - clearly not a sustainable situation.
- creshal 11y ago
  Zip drives would have gained popularity, probably, to be later supplanted/replaced by read-only USB sticks/memory cards.
- pavlov 11y ago
  The Zip drive by Iomega enjoyed a few years of popularity around 1995-1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive They were commonly used in graphic design, at least. (Designers needed to send files to print all the time, and the Zip drive was the standard until CD-R became cheap and fast enough.)
  - jzzskijj 11y ago
    And for the last mile: Moving the downloaded goods from Fast Internet Place (as in the computer class of the school) to Slow Internet Place (home with V.34 only connection). And to send them via snail mail between swapper friends.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    There were Zip, there were Jaz, there were LS120, there were various MO formats. Thinking about it i wonder if what killed it was not just the CD-R, but also that it went from primary storage (early PC etc) to transitory storage (sneakernet etc) as HDDs took over.
    - rplst8 11y ago
      I actually bought a floppy drive from Best Buy around 2002 as a replacement. I had some old files I needed from floppy, and Best Buy was the only place open. Cost me $35 at the time. When I got home, I was surprised to find the floppy drive inside had a 40 pin connector instead of the standard 34 pin (MFM) connector. The drive seemed a little different, and I hesitantly connected it to my desktop to find that it was recognized as an LS-120 drive. By 2002 LS-120 was already past its peak and even Zip drives were pretty much old news. I think I got my first Thumb drive a year later, with about 512 MB of storage. I still have the LS-120 drive in my primary desktop, and it was a nice drive. It was quieter than other floppy drives, and had a motorized load and eject function.
sytelus 11y ago
It's truly frightening to see logic used to justify use of floppy disks in nuke silos: reliability, "tried and true", no need for internet connection! None of these make any technical sense. This software likely is getting no real testing so all these assertions are pointless. The naive assumption that whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is completely baseless. It's almost guaranteed that the software possibly has many bugs and issues that wouldn't have been addressed without advances in tools and techniques such as TDD, ability to do massive exhaustive testing, ability to measure code coverage, better safety features in languages, fixes in standard libraries, patches in kernels, provable algorithms for multi-threading and so on. Just think about old flaky FAT disk format VS advanced far more reliable new disk formats. If you can develop new fighter planes, you can sure develop new control software that is at least as reliable as previous generation.
- certainly_not 11y ago
  The systems are time-tested. How many accidental launches have happened so far? Zero. In my opinion that's the most important metric of these systems, as long as they are still credible threats otherwise. Also, what could a better system improve? Slightly faster launches? Slightly more certain launches? I argue that those are not important -- the enemy won't fear the missiles more if they run off USB. But you might increase the chance of a false launch, and certainly incur large testing costs.
  - pdw 11y ago
    From a military point of view, the huge advantage of floppy disks is that they're dumb storage. The modern replacements such as USB storage or SD cards are microprocessor-based systems. How are you going to verify that the SD cards you're buying don't have malicious firmware?
    - amorphid 11y ago
      You most definitely don't want infected USB drives in your nuclear facility! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
WalterBright 11y ago
I don't miss floppies.
gaius 11y ago
A floppy disk ejected from the drive and stored in a safe with a Marine with a rifle standing in front of it, is 1000x more secure than anything connected to the Internet. Maybe a million times more.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lucozade 11y ago
  If I recall correctly it wasn't the storage bit that was usually the problem. It was the "A:\ is not accessible" message you received when you put it back in.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    I hope that important systems have multiple copies in multiple sites... I fear they don't.
  - gaius 11y ago
    Punch cards or tape then, what you lose in rewriteability you gain in reliability.
    - lucozade 11y ago
      Having used both I'd tend to agree with you. Completely safe from EMPs and North Koreas. It's just mice you have to watch out for.
      - gaius 11y ago
        A Marine with a rifle and a cat, then
        pluma 11y ago
        Another problem solved by adding cats.
blue1 11y ago
I remember the various floppies (5.25", 3.5") to be the most unreliable piece of technology I have ever worked with (almost on par with Datassette tapes). Read errors were commonplace.
- whoopdedo 11y ago
  Having gone through a pile of old floppy disks, I think magnetic media is pretty reliable for long-term storage if treated well. Keep them clean, away from strong magnets, and at moderate temperature and humidity and the data will remain readable for many years. Where it fails is on re-writing. The disks I had that were most likely to be bad after sitting in storage were the ones I had erased multiple times. If I had only written to a disk once or twice then I usually had no problem reading it again.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    rotate it regularly... if you're talking tape drives, re-wind them and always store upright... too much has been lost to poorly storing magnetic and film media. Fortunately digital conversion is pretty damned good and easy enough to back up... if only "The Wonder Years" hadn't downmixed the music and vocals into their master copies... :-(
rdl 11y ago
Could you make a simulated floppy disk which worked in existing physical drives, but contained flash (and thus lots of more storage, potentially more reliable, etc.)? I know there are floppy DRIVE emulators like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator but I want to emulate the DISK. There are also of course software solutions to this in a lot of cases, too, especially if you can virtualize, but sometimes hardware is needed.
- pjc50 11y ago
  It's almost certainly doable, although detecting the head position is going to be a hassle. But you can't increase the capacity much, because you're limited to N sectors and M tracks.
  - rdl 11y ago
    Yeah, but you can have a huge library of virtual floppies and load those based on external selector or something else.
  - jzwinck 11y ago
    I'm not sure you need to detect the head position, because in the end you need to deliver the appropriate signal at the same location, so it'd be simpler to just have a linear array of 80 "heads" in the "disk" and let the drive head read from whichever one it likes. Then you would only need to track the spindle position. Head-to-head coupling works in the real world, as anyone who has used a cassette tape adapter in their car stereo knows. I don't know how much "horizontal" tolerance you would need in terms of emitting the signal from the "disk"; if different drives have their heads not quite on center it could present some difficulty (whereas with real disks it would not matter--they could position the head anywhere within the shutter aperture). Miniaturization would be another challenge--unless you're willing to have a ribbon cable coming out the front of the drive, you'll need to cram some batteries inside what is quite a thin space. Perhaps harvest some energy from the spindle (it would almost certainly be enough if you manage to find or create a thin enough generator). The last piece of the product puzzle might be to add Bluetooth...if for no other reason than being able to get data out as soon as it is written.
rollthehard6 11y ago
Another floppy disk hold out are the many musical keyboards/synths manufactured in the 80s and 90s that used floppy drives to load patches and sequences. Hell, patch, there is another anachronism that has a lot in common with the floppy disk icon :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch
- buffoon 11y ago
  Still use one of them myself. Korg Triton :)
- coldpie 11y ago
  Huh, I always wondered where that term came from.
byuu 11y ago
I've had to use them up until just recently. To run reverse engineering tests on an SNES console, I've had to use an old copier device. It's a box that plugs into the cartridge port and will load games off of floppy disks. (and of course, it can copy games plugged into the box onto said floppies.) Usually takes around 5-10 minutes to split an image file into four parts, write them to floppies, and then load them one at a time onto the copier. And it's only that fast because I'd do it in parallel. The disks would usually fail after a few hundred write cycles, so I stocked up on quite a few. Thankfully, I now have two alternatives. A flash cart that takes an SD card, and soon a boot loader for the expansion port that will let me load my own code through the controller port via serial. So I'm done with floppies at long last; but now my new fun is sourcing 5V-tolerant components, and card edge connectors for an extremely rare pitch size :D
- tracker1 11y ago
  If you're into firearms and close to a suitable location, seeing a cell phone fly apart from snake-shot (think shotgun-style ammo for a handgun) at close range is pretty gratifying, even if cleanup isn't the most fun... used to do that once a year with expired hardware, more so with the troublesome hardware.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
I wonder how difficult it would be for FloppyDisk.com to actually manufacture their own floppies.
otis_inf 11y ago
One word that I don't associate with floppies is 'reliable'. I don't know how many times I had bad sectors on my floppies back in the day. There's no protection against magnetic fields, the material on the plastic disk isn't always OK (hence the 'single sided' 3.5" floppies you could buy and which you could transform into double-sided floppies by punching a hole in the corner ;)) So it was surprising to me that floppies were seen as reliable in the article and e.g. usb sticks aren't (they're not mentioned as an alternative at all, which I find a little odd)
- gpvos 11y ago
  As long as USB sticks can masquerade as keyboards, having a USB port is not really desirable in a secure environment. And the need for high reliability often goes together with a need for high security.
  - otis_inf 11y ago
    Good point, didn't think of that.
- avian 11y ago
  > There's no protection against magnetic fields I agree that floppies were all but reliable in practice. But I suspect sensitivity to magnetic fields was largely a myth. I did some experiments back in the day with some permanent magnets and 3.5" disks. As I remember it was pretty hard to make the disk unreadable with those. Granted they were probably much weaker than what is available today (neodymium must have been terribly exotic back then). I was much less afraid after that that some carelessly positioned magnet will wipe out my floppy library.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I agree. I tried to erase 3.5" and 5.25" floppies with refrigerator magnets as a kid, and they did nothing. Magnetism is an inverse-cube law, and the write head is really close to the disk. Even if you hold your magnet to the floppy casing, you have a hard fight against the inverse cube.
DiThi 11y ago
Many complain here about how bad the disks where, but nobody seem to remember the sudden quality drop in the late 90s. For me it was very different to use a (not very used) 10 year old disk than using a freshly bought one, any brand.
- VLM 11y ago
  Optical media underwent a similar reliability collapse where long term reliability went from near 100% to maybe 50% when prices dropped. I haven't used legacy flash media in a long time, I wonder if it followed the same pattern toward the end of its life when prices collapsed. Flash sticks used to be pretty reliable... back when 32 megs was a big flash drive.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Well older flash media likely use larger components on the dies. And larger components means less leakage, iirc. That said, i wonder how much the quality drop of various media can be traced to outsorcing fever. Meaning that just about every brand just a sticker on the same product made in some Asian sweat shop factory.
rwhitman 11y ago
Vintage electronic music gear, which is still widely popular with certain genres of music, use floppies heavily. 12-bit samplers like the E-mu SP-1200 and Akai MPC60 which are still popular with hip hop producers rely on floppies. A number of other classic samplers and synthesizers use them as well. There's a lot of demand for floppies in that community.
- scrumper 11y ago
  Knowing that group (meaning vintage gear heads rather than hip hop producers) there's doubtless endless online discussions about which particular brand of floppy gives the crunchiest sound. Can't beat the warmth of the MF2-HD.
kazinator 11y ago
When I was in high school, some kid's 3.5" floppy didn't read. He was all upset about losing some images he had been working on in a paint program. I slid open the window and turned the center hub to inspect the surface, which soon revealed a glaring fingerprint; some prankster almost certainly had done that on purpose. I peeled the black, plastic casing open, and took out the disk, which I then gently washed with cold water and soap in the boys' washroom, drying it with a paper towel. I slid the disk it back into its casing, and popped it into the drive. It read perfectly.
dade_ 11y ago
The Morbidelli U26 still runs like a tank, this article is bang on. The industrial control units are proprietary as are the drive pinouts. That said, it does support KERMIT, but it is a lot more difficult to train people to use a serial terminal than it is to just keep using floppies. Apparently they are still running 15K Euro: http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473 http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473
mhd 11y ago
It's a common source of ridicule amongst German IT workers (esp. commuters) that our high-speed trains ("ICE") still use disks to transfer seat reservations. And it's not that infrequent that you'll hear "seat reservations can't be displayed" being announced at the platform, probably because the train couldn't be anointed by the holy plastic wafer.
fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
>The key word here is reliability — and that’s likely the reason floppy disks are still being used in medical equipment, ATMs, and aviation hardware as Tom mentioned. The cutting edge of technology is fine for your smartphone or a video game console. But when it comes to mission-critical hardware that literally controls a potential nuclear holocaust, “tried and true” carries more weight than “new and improved.” Great gobs of bullshit. Floppies aren't reliable and they never were. The disks are easily damaged, susceptible to contamination from dust, they wear out quickly; the same goes for the drives. As an example, the Tektronix 3000 series oscilloscopes came equipped with floppy drives, and that was by far the most common reason (like many times more often than any other reason) for repair on the things. Thankfully after they started coming equipped with ethernet, you could forget about the floppy drive. Take note that all the examples mentioned relate to industries which are very conservative WRT implementing technology, and have an onerous approval process to get new tech in use; that's not evidence that floppies are somehow superior, but rather that the process for approving new tech. is sometimes too burdensome. When I was in college, a large fraction of my IEEE chapter's non-dues fundraising was through sales of floppy disks to students; because the damn things weren't reliable. The "This Morning" segment included is a fluff piece, and completely at odds with recent (well, 2013/2014, not too distant past) reporting of serious problems with the stewardship of nuclear weapons. I am not sure why any sane person would want to gloss over those problems http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268880352/air-force-cheating-scandal-widens-to-92-nuclear-officers http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268880352/... http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-Force-scandal-cheating-by-nuclear-launch-officers-video http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-...
- kazinator 11y ago
  Indeed. You will get better mileage out of some reasonably small EEPROM (also, old, tried and true) that has millions of write cycles and a 100 year lifetime. Chip encased in epoxy, no moving parts. No brainer. The only reason floppies would be used in some medical equipment is that in that kind of niche market, you can get away with holding customers hostage with old crap (and at inflated prices).
- runholm 11y ago
protomyth 11y ago
The 8" disks I used were actually pretty good for reliability[1]. The 5 1/4" drives were just plain problematic. Doubly so if you used a "Disk Doubler"[2]. The 3 1/2" were pretty nice after the 5 1/4", but I'm still not sure they were ever as good as the 8". I'm glad to be rid of the whole lot of them with USB Flash drives. I will say it was quite exciting to buy an Indus Floppy Drive for my Atari 400 (upgraded to 48Kbytes). It was amazing going from the 410 cassette player to the floppy. The door popped up in a most satisfying manner. 1) I'm with the other posters that "tried and true" and "know quantity" is probably a better way to look at it. Also, the stuff using the floppy drives probably just works. 2) for the younger crowd, at one time 5 1/4 floppies came in single sided and double sided varieties. So, depending on the floppy drive you bought the correct one. The price wasn't all that different. 5 1/4 floppies have a notch on the side that tells you how to insert it. Put it in wrong and the drive won't close since part of the mechanism goes down through the notch. Now, some "genius" decided that if you had a single sided drive and cut a notch in the other side of the floppy you could use both sides of the disk in much the same way you could play both sides of a record. This 'genius' started selling a device that was basically a hole puncher with a metal attachment that held the floppy properly to punch the hole (really a small square punch). You then could use both sides. Now, inserting the disk upside down would work, but the disk spins the opposite direction. You can guess how this interacted with the fabric that removed dust built into the floppy. http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING_YOUR_DISK.php http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING... is an old article on it and Wikipedia has pictures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_disks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_di... Serendipity is an amazing thing, as I type this "I'm Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)" just started playing on my music player. I'll leave it to someone else to explain the purpose of the pencil when talking cassette tapes.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I'd imagine that the tolerances are loose enough on an 8" floppy, that barring physical damage, they probably are pretty reliable. 5.25 were somewhat problematic though... I remember in the mid 90's when the quality went through the toilet.. the last 50-pack of 3.5" 2shd disks I bought, I swear about 1 in 4 had errors out of the box... I don't think I used even half of it though. I've kept a home server and/or nas since the early 00's, and haven't really looked back... I did notice how slow even flash media is though, trying to copy a season of a tv show to my tablet to view while out of town for a couple days recently... took too long, not enough space (got a 128gb microsd for next time), and just plain cumbersome. It's hard to think about being disconnected these days. I lost over half my workday to a VPN issue.
RobCubed 11y ago
A lot of CNC machines still use floppies. There are some great USB interfaces (that emulate a floppy drive to the CNC controller) that let you use USB sticks. You still have to format the USB stick to 1.44MB (so... buy lots of very small ones) for it to work, but it's been much better since we've switched to these.
tracker1 11y ago
I recently bought a new 3.5" usb floppy drive because a few friends wanted some stuff off their old disks, no telling how much will be recoverable, but willing to try. It's interesting how little I've thought about the old formats for years. How many floppy/zip/jazz etc disks have useful data on them to this day. I worked doing support for iomega back in the day and the only thing it made me was slightly paranoid about multiple copies in multiple locations for anything really important.

97 points by bowyakka 11y ago

I liked this story. I still have a few floppies in storage as mementos of times long since past. Maybe I'll consider sending in to make them useful for someone somewhere else.

stinos 11y ago
I have a 'picture wall' at our house and in between the pictures with good memories I also put some floppy disks (and cassettes). Looks nice in my opinion and reminds me of those times when taking a picture was still somewhat special, and the output was something to be kept, whereas now in the majority of cases it seems pictures are taken to be looked at once and then forgotten for eternity.
- kqr 11y ago
  There are still some of us crazies around who take photos on film and create prints ourselves in a bathroom-turned-darkroom in our homes. Definitely gives more weight to each picture when the turnaround is weeks, and each picture requires hours of physical work.
jzzskijj 11y ago
I still have a good collection of Atari ST demos on floppies. Even managed to find a working floppy drive (had to try three different drives) for a PC to write some recent demoscene productions (2010-2015) on floppies.
- kaybe 11y ago
  If it ever stops working - I basically fixed mine by opening it and vacuuming inside.

tragomaskhalos 11y ago

It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if the parallel innovations of CD and internet had not sidelined the floppy, since software was already outgrowing them : the last version of Visual C++ that I installed from floppies came on IIRC several dozen disks, requiring the thing to be carried in a couple of sturdy carrier bags - clearly not a sustainable situation.

creshal 11y ago
Zip drives would have gained popularity, probably, to be later supplanted/replaced by read-only USB sticks/memory cards.
pavlov 11y ago
The Zip drive by Iomega enjoyed a few years of popularity around 1995-1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive They were commonly used in graphic design, at least. (Designers needed to send files to print all the time, and the Zip drive was the standard until CD-R became cheap and fast enough.)
- jzzskijj 11y ago
  And for the last mile: Moving the downloaded goods from Fast Internet Place (as in the computer class of the school) to Slow Internet Place (home with V.34 only connection). And to send them via snail mail between swapper friends.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  There were Zip, there were Jaz, there were LS120, there were various MO formats. Thinking about it i wonder if what killed it was not just the CD-R, but also that it went from primary storage (early PC etc) to transitory storage (sneakernet etc) as HDDs took over.
  - rplst8 11y ago
    I actually bought a floppy drive from Best Buy around 2002 as a replacement. I had some old files I needed from floppy, and Best Buy was the only place open. Cost me $35 at the time. When I got home, I was surprised to find the floppy drive inside had a 40 pin connector instead of the standard 34 pin (MFM) connector. The drive seemed a little different, and I hesitantly connected it to my desktop to find that it was recognized as an LS-120 drive. By 2002 LS-120 was already past its peak and even Zip drives were pretty much old news. I think I got my first Thumb drive a year later, with about 512 MB of storage. I still have the LS-120 drive in my primary desktop, and it was a nice drive. It was quieter than other floppy drives, and had a motorized load and eject function.

sytelus 11y ago

It's truly frightening to see logic used to justify use of floppy disks in nuke silos: reliability, "tried and true", no need for internet connection! None of these make any technical sense. This software likely is getting no real testing so all these assertions are pointless. The naive assumption that whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is completely baseless. It's almost guaranteed that the software possibly has many bugs and issues that wouldn't have been addressed without advances in tools and techniques such as TDD, ability to do massive exhaustive testing, ability to measure code coverage, better safety features in languages, fixes in standard libraries, patches in kernels, provable algorithms for multi-threading and so on. Just think about old flaky FAT disk format VS advanced far more reliable new disk formats. If you can develop new fighter planes, you can sure develop new control software that is at least as reliable as previous generation.

certainly_not 11y ago
The systems are time-tested. How many accidental launches have happened so far? Zero. In my opinion that's the most important metric of these systems, as long as they are still credible threats otherwise. Also, what could a better system improve? Slightly faster launches? Slightly more certain launches? I argue that those are not important -- the enemy won't fear the missiles more if they run off USB. But you might increase the chance of a false launch, and certainly incur large testing costs.
- pdw 11y ago
  From a military point of view, the huge advantage of floppy disks is that they're dumb storage. The modern replacements such as USB storage or SD cards are microprocessor-based systems. How are you going to verify that the SD cards you're buying don't have malicious firmware?
  - amorphid 11y ago
    You most definitely don't want infected USB drives in your nuclear facility! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

WalterBright 11y ago

I don't miss floppies.

gaius 11y ago

A floppy disk ejected from the drive and stored in a safe with a Marine with a rifle standing in front of it, is 1000x more secure than anything connected to the Internet. Maybe a million times more.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lucozade 11y ago
If I recall correctly it wasn't the storage bit that was usually the problem. It was the "A:\ is not accessible" message you received when you put it back in.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  I hope that important systems have multiple copies in multiple sites... I fear they don't.
- gaius 11y ago
  Punch cards or tape then, what you lose in rewriteability you gain in reliability.
  - lucozade 11y ago
    Having used both I'd tend to agree with you. Completely safe from EMPs and North Koreas. It's just mice you have to watch out for.
    - gaius 11y ago
      A Marine with a rifle and a cat, then
      - pluma 11y ago
        Another problem solved by adding cats.

blue1 11y ago

I remember the various floppies (5.25", 3.5") to be the most unreliable piece of technology I have ever worked with (almost on par with Datassette tapes). Read errors were commonplace.

whoopdedo 11y ago
Having gone through a pile of old floppy disks, I think magnetic media is pretty reliable for long-term storage if treated well. Keep them clean, away from strong magnets, and at moderate temperature and humidity and the data will remain readable for many years. Where it fails is on re-writing. The disks I had that were most likely to be bad after sitting in storage were the ones I had erased multiple times. If I had only written to a disk once or twice then I usually had no problem reading it again.
- tracker1 11y ago
  rotate it regularly... if you're talking tape drives, re-wind them and always store upright... too much has been lost to poorly storing magnetic and film media. Fortunately digital conversion is pretty damned good and easy enough to back up... if only "The Wonder Years" hadn't downmixed the music and vocals into their master copies... :-(

rdl 11y ago

Could you make a simulated floppy disk which worked in existing physical drives, but contained flash (and thus lots of more storage, potentially more reliable, etc.)? I know there are floppy DRIVE emulators like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator but I want to emulate the DISK. There are also of course software solutions to this in a lot of cases, too, especially if you can virtualize, but sometimes hardware is needed.

pjc50 11y ago
It's almost certainly doable, although detecting the head position is going to be a hassle. But you can't increase the capacity much, because you're limited to N sectors and M tracks.
- rdl 11y ago
  Yeah, but you can have a huge library of virtual floppies and load those based on external selector or something else.
- jzwinck 11y ago
  I'm not sure you need to detect the head position, because in the end you need to deliver the appropriate signal at the same location, so it'd be simpler to just have a linear array of 80 "heads" in the "disk" and let the drive head read from whichever one it likes. Then you would only need to track the spindle position. Head-to-head coupling works in the real world, as anyone who has used a cassette tape adapter in their car stereo knows. I don't know how much "horizontal" tolerance you would need in terms of emitting the signal from the "disk"; if different drives have their heads not quite on center it could present some difficulty (whereas with real disks it would not matter--they could position the head anywhere within the shutter aperture). Miniaturization would be another challenge--unless you're willing to have a ribbon cable coming out the front of the drive, you'll need to cram some batteries inside what is quite a thin space. Perhaps harvest some energy from the spindle (it would almost certainly be enough if you manage to find or create a thin enough generator). The last piece of the product puzzle might be to add Bluetooth...if for no other reason than being able to get data out as soon as it is written.

rollthehard6 11y ago

Another floppy disk hold out are the many musical keyboards/synths manufactured in the 80s and 90s that used floppy drives to load patches and sequences. Hell, patch, there is another anachronism that has a lot in common with the floppy disk icon :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch

buffoon 11y ago
Still use one of them myself. Korg Triton :)
coldpie 11y ago
Huh, I always wondered where that term came from.

byuu 11y ago

I've had to use them up until just recently. To run reverse engineering tests on an SNES console, I've had to use an old copier device. It's a box that plugs into the cartridge port and will load games off of floppy disks. (and of course, it can copy games plugged into the box onto said floppies.) Usually takes around 5-10 minutes to split an image file into four parts, write them to floppies, and then load them one at a time onto the copier. And it's only that fast because I'd do it in parallel. The disks would usually fail after a few hundred write cycles, so I stocked up on quite a few. Thankfully, I now have two alternatives. A flash cart that takes an SD card, and soon a boot loader for the expansion port that will let me load my own code through the controller port via serial. So I'm done with floppies at long last; but now my new fun is sourcing 5V-tolerant components, and card edge connectors for an extremely rare pitch size :D

tracker1 11y ago
If you're into firearms and close to a suitable location, seeing a cell phone fly apart from snake-shot (think shotgun-style ammo for a handgun) at close range is pretty gratifying, even if cleanup isn't the most fun... used to do that once a year with expired hardware, more so with the troublesome hardware.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

I wonder how difficult it would be for FloppyDisk.com to actually manufacture their own floppies.

otis_inf 11y ago

One word that I don't associate with floppies is 'reliable'. I don't know how many times I had bad sectors on my floppies back in the day. There's no protection against magnetic fields, the material on the plastic disk isn't always OK (hence the 'single sided' 3.5" floppies you could buy and which you could transform into double-sided floppies by punching a hole in the corner ;)) So it was surprising to me that floppies were seen as reliable in the article and e.g. usb sticks aren't (they're not mentioned as an alternative at all, which I find a little odd)

gpvos 11y ago
As long as USB sticks can masquerade as keyboards, having a USB port is not really desirable in a secure environment. And the need for high reliability often goes together with a need for high security.
- otis_inf 11y ago
  Good point, didn't think of that.
avian 11y ago
> There's no protection against magnetic fields I agree that floppies were all but reliable in practice. But I suspect sensitivity to magnetic fields was largely a myth. I did some experiments back in the day with some permanent magnets and 3.5" disks. As I remember it was pretty hard to make the disk unreadable with those. Granted they were probably much weaker than what is available today (neodymium must have been terribly exotic back then). I was much less afraid after that that some carelessly positioned magnet will wipe out my floppy library.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I agree. I tried to erase 3.5" and 5.25" floppies with refrigerator magnets as a kid, and they did nothing. Magnetism is an inverse-cube law, and the write head is really close to the disk. Even if you hold your magnet to the floppy casing, you have a hard fight against the inverse cube.

DiThi 11y ago

Many complain here about how bad the disks where, but nobody seem to remember the sudden quality drop in the late 90s. For me it was very different to use a (not very used) 10 year old disk than using a freshly bought one, any brand.

VLM 11y ago
Optical media underwent a similar reliability collapse where long term reliability went from near 100% to maybe 50% when prices dropped. I haven't used legacy flash media in a long time, I wonder if it followed the same pattern toward the end of its life when prices collapsed. Flash sticks used to be pretty reliable... back when 32 megs was a big flash drive.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Well older flash media likely use larger components on the dies. And larger components means less leakage, iirc. That said, i wonder how much the quality drop of various media can be traced to outsorcing fever. Meaning that just about every brand just a sticker on the same product made in some Asian sweat shop factory.

rwhitman 11y ago

Vintage electronic music gear, which is still widely popular with certain genres of music, use floppies heavily. 12-bit samplers like the E-mu SP-1200 and Akai MPC60 which are still popular with hip hop producers rely on floppies. A number of other classic samplers and synthesizers use them as well. There's a lot of demand for floppies in that community.

scrumper 11y ago
Knowing that group (meaning vintage gear heads rather than hip hop producers) there's doubtless endless online discussions about which particular brand of floppy gives the crunchiest sound. Can't beat the warmth of the MF2-HD.

kazinator 11y ago

When I was in high school, some kid's 3.5" floppy didn't read. He was all upset about losing some images he had been working on in a paint program. I slid open the window and turned the center hub to inspect the surface, which soon revealed a glaring fingerprint; some prankster almost certainly had done that on purpose. I peeled the black, plastic casing open, and took out the disk, which I then gently washed with cold water and soap in the boys' washroom, drying it with a paper towel. I slid the disk it back into its casing, and popped it into the drive. It read perfectly.

dade_ 11y ago

The Morbidelli U26 still runs like a tank, this article is bang on. The industrial control units are proprietary as are the drive pinouts. That said, it does support KERMIT, but it is a lot more difficult to train people to use a serial terminal than it is to just keep using floppies. Apparently they are still running 15K Euro: http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473 http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473

mhd 11y ago

It's a common source of ridicule amongst German IT workers (esp. commuters) that our high-speed trains ("ICE") still use disks to transfer seat reservations. And it's not that infrequent that you'll hear "seat reservations can't be displayed" being announced at the platform, probably because the train couldn't be anointed by the holy plastic wafer.

fnordfnordfnord 11y ago

>The key word here is reliability — and that’s likely the reason floppy disks are still being used in medical equipment, ATMs, and aviation hardware as Tom mentioned. The cutting edge of technology is fine for your smartphone or a video game console. But when it comes to mission-critical hardware that literally controls a potential nuclear holocaust, “tried and true” carries more weight than “new and improved.” Great gobs of bullshit. Floppies aren't reliable and they never were. The disks are easily damaged, susceptible to contamination from dust, they wear out quickly; the same goes for the drives. As an example, the Tektronix 3000 series oscilloscopes came equipped with floppy drives, and that was by far the most common reason (like many times more often than any other reason) for repair on the things. Thankfully after they started coming equipped with ethernet, you could forget about the floppy drive. Take note that all the examples mentioned relate to industries which are very conservative WRT implementing technology, and have an onerous approval process to get new tech in use; that's not evidence that floppies are somehow superior, but rather that the process for approving new tech. is sometimes too burdensome. When I was in college, a large fraction of my IEEE chapter's non-dues fundraising was through sales of floppy disks to students; because the damn things weren't reliable. The "This Morning" segment included is a fluff piece, and completely at odds with recent (well, 2013/2014, not too distant past) reporting of serious problems with the stewardship of nuclear weapons. I am not sure why any sane person would want to gloss over those problems http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268880352/air-force-cheating-scandal-widens-to-92-nuclear-officers http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268880352/... http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-Force-scandal-cheating-by-nuclear-launch-officers-video http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-...

kazinator 11y ago
Indeed. You will get better mileage out of some reasonably small EEPROM (also, old, tried and true) that has millions of write cycles and a 100 year lifetime. Chip encased in epoxy, no moving parts. No brainer. The only reason floppies would be used in some medical equipment is that in that kind of niche market, you can get away with holding customers hostage with old crap (and at inflated prices).
runholm 11y ago

protomyth 11y ago

The 8" disks I used were actually pretty good for reliability[1]. The 5 1/4" drives were just plain problematic. Doubly so if you used a "Disk Doubler"[2]. The 3 1/2" were pretty nice after the 5 1/4", but I'm still not sure they were ever as good as the 8". I'm glad to be rid of the whole lot of them with USB Flash drives. I will say it was quite exciting to buy an Indus Floppy Drive for my Atari 400 (upgraded to 48Kbytes). It was amazing going from the 410 cassette player to the floppy. The door popped up in a most satisfying manner. 1) I'm with the other posters that "tried and true" and "know quantity" is probably a better way to look at it. Also, the stuff using the floppy drives probably just works. 2) for the younger crowd, at one time 5 1/4 floppies came in single sided and double sided varieties. So, depending on the floppy drive you bought the correct one. The price wasn't all that different. 5 1/4 floppies have a notch on the side that tells you how to insert it. Put it in wrong and the drive won't close since part of the mechanism goes down through the notch. Now, some "genius" decided that if you had a single sided drive and cut a notch in the other side of the floppy you could use both sides of the disk in much the same way you could play both sides of a record. This 'genius' started selling a device that was basically a hole puncher with a metal attachment that held the floppy properly to punch the hole (really a small square punch). You then could use both sides. Now, inserting the disk upside down would work, but the disk spins the opposite direction. You can guess how this interacted with the fabric that removed dust built into the floppy. http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING_YOUR_DISK.php http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING... is an old article on it and Wikipedia has pictures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_disks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_di... Serendipity is an amazing thing, as I type this "I'm Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)" just started playing on my music player. I'll leave it to someone else to explain the purpose of the pencil when talking cassette tapes.

tracker1 11y ago
I'd imagine that the tolerances are loose enough on an 8" floppy, that barring physical damage, they probably are pretty reliable. 5.25 were somewhat problematic though... I remember in the mid 90's when the quality went through the toilet.. the last 50-pack of 3.5" 2shd disks I bought, I swear about 1 in 4 had errors out of the box... I don't think I used even half of it though. I've kept a home server and/or nas since the early 00's, and haven't really looked back... I did notice how slow even flash media is though, trying to copy a season of a tv show to my tablet to view while out of town for a couple days recently... took too long, not enough space (got a 128gb microsd for next time), and just plain cumbersome. It's hard to think about being disconnected these days. I lost over half my workday to a VPN issue.

RobCubed 11y ago

A lot of CNC machines still use floppies. There are some great USB interfaces (that emulate a floppy drive to the CNC controller) that let you use USB sticks. You still have to format the USB stick to 1.44MB (so... buy lots of very small ones) for it to work, but it's been much better since we've switched to these.

tracker1 11y ago

I recently bought a new 3.5" usb floppy drive because a few friends wanted some stuff off their old disks, no telling how much will be recoverable, but willing to try. It's interesting how little I've thought about the old formats for years. How many floppy/zip/jazz etc disks have useful data on them to this day. I worked doing support for iomega back in the day and the only thing it made me was slightly paranoid about multiple copies in multiple locations for anything really important.