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> All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk? Oh my! I feel sooo old now! > replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a

> All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk? Oh my! I feel sooo old now! > replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution I thought SSDs are not very reliable, no? Especially for the crucial infras. It looks like complexity and maintenance has also increased exponentially.

djohnston 7y ago
Anecdotally, I'd estimate 10% of floppy disks I purchased were DOA, and about 0% for SSDs. Would be curious for more rigorous data
- rinchik 7y ago
  Yep. Floppies were not reliable at all, but cheap, disposable, and very convenient (during those times). My point about SSDs was not about SSD vs floppy, but about SSD vs some other modern tech. e.g. super secure proprietary tape storage.
  - omarhaneef 7y ago
    Tape? More reliable than SSD? I thought you said you were old? Jokes aside, the best reliability is probably more redundancy. Take a few SSDs, write the same data over and over (multiple times on each). If more than 50% agree, then its legit. You can increase the reliability by arbitrarily increasing the redundancy in this case.
    - carlmr 7y ago
      >Take a few SSDs, write the same data over and over (multiple times on each). If more than 50% agree, then its legit They may all fail at the same or very similar time if you write the same data to them
    - azernik 7y ago
      Tape is still used for archival purposes, as it has very long shelf life (i.e. longevity when not under heavy usage) and low cost per byte of storage (fancy electronics go into the R/W machine and the library hardware, not the tapes). AWS Glacier (https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/) was built to replace on-premise tape libraries, and while no one knows exactly what storage medium they use, a tape library is one of the possibilities given the pricing model (cheap storage, expensive retrieval) and retrieval delays (on the order of hours, unless you're willing to pay extra for on the order of minutes). Other possibilities I've heard thrown around include I/O-poor NAS boxes, and a tape-like mechanical library of optical disks.
      - rootusrootus 7y ago
        I recall reading somewhere (pretty sure it was actually here) that Glacier used some sort of custom low-RPM spinning rust that could be spun down when not in use and otherwise took very little power.
        azernik 7y ago
        No one really knows - there have been leaks saying multiple contradictory things over the years, which leads me to believe they're experimenting with a variety of storage technologies.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  More anecdata, but my experience was that as floppies became less common (around 2000-2005?) the quality control got way worse if you just got a random box of them from Office Max or wherever.
  - djohnston 7y ago
    that's interesting, i was purchasing in early 2000's so that lines up
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Up to around 1995 I had about 0 defects. Later the quality decreased until around 10-20% defects.
  - topspin 7y ago
    That was my experience. I used (and not gently) hundreds of 5.25" floppies in the mid to late 1980s and had very few problems. Wore out drives, but the disks lasted forever. At first 3.25" disks were very good as well; it was normal to install a commercial software product that was distributed on a half dozen or more 3.25" disks that would all work perfectly year after year. Later quality dropped off and floppy media became rather unreliable. I can only imagine how reliable a mil spec 8" drive with mil spec media must be.
    - AdrianB1 7y ago
      The 5.25" disks were much more reliable than the 3.5". I had plenty of bad 3.5" after I used it a lot, but almost no bad 5.25" disk. Not sure if it was related to the areal density, rotational speed, head distance - I've seen scratched 3.5" disks quite often. I still have a 8" disk in my desk's drawer, but I have no reader to check it. It is probably still good more than 25 years after the last time it was written (I have it since ~ 1992).
  - tropo 7y ago
    I was about to make this comment with the exact same year. In 1994, the low-end brands went bad. By 1995, all brands were bad. A few years later, the drives started to be bad.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  That was the late 90s and early 2000s when the manufacturing was off-shored and hired out. I rehabbed my dads old IBM XT a few years ago, 10/10 new in box 5.25” floppy disks were in perfect condition.
  - gerbilly 7y ago
    Yup all my Apple ][ floppies are still readable. I formatted them between 1985-1990. Most of the CDROMs I burned in the 2000s are bad, no matter how much I spent on the blanks.
fennecfoxen 7y ago
> Oh my! I feel sooo old now! I've handled 5.25" floppies on old computers (running DOS and old, old, ~~Mac~~ Apple operating systems), but 8" floppies specifically are an extra level of ancient and hard-to-find.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Macs have been using 3.5" floppies from the word go. Were you using after market drives? Early prototype Macs?
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    You're right, it was more Apple II (or similar) than Mac. The brands have blurred in my mind with time!
- antod 7y ago
  My high school computer lab (barely/rarely) ran off 8" floppies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1 The dozen or so computers were "networked" to a shared storage unit (Proteus?) that consisted of two 8" floppy drives. Not that we got our own disks or anything - they were more of a permanently mounted NAS/SAN. We'd probably average a couple of hours class time per year on them, so not very effective. This was 5 years or so after I'd already used 5.25" floppies on a TRS-80, and about the same time 3.5" ones were used on early Macs and Amigas.
  - vmlinuz 7y ago
    My school computer room had a single old machine which took 8" floppies, entirely unused and gathering dust in a corner, when I started computer studies in the late 80s, and a room full of 5.25"-equipped BBC micros... By the time I left, the BBCs had largely been replaced by semi-IBM-compatible RM Nimbus PCs with 3.25" drives. At home, on the other hand, I spent a while with an Amstrad PCW - running CP/M from 3" floppies!
russdill 7y ago
One of the nice things about SSDs is that they can be designed to exacting specifications of reliability and longevity.
jcadam 7y ago
Huh, floppies have been gone that long? Back when I was doing my BSCS (1998-2002), we turned in our assignments in a folder containing a printed code listing and a 3.5" floppy disk - there were better ways to move small amounts of source code around even then, so I suspect it had something to do with some of the more eccentric CS professors insisting on using old machines (I saw old 68k UNIX boxen (including NextStations) in some offices). I actually don't think I used floppies much anymore after college. Most of the new hires we get these days say they turned in coding assignments by pushing them to a git server. The US Government had a big thing for ZIP drives for a while. Saw those in wide use when I entered the defense contracting world in the late 2000s.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  > [...] The US Government had a big thing for ZIP drives for a while. Saw those in wide use when I entered the defense contracting world in the late 2000s. I love this statement. Because to me Zip drives died around the year 2000-ish from a regular consumer usage perspective.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Government IT: Yesterday’s stuff, tomorrow.
jeffdavis 7y ago
"Solid state digital" is a fairly generic term, and the actual device may bear little resemblance to what you think of as an SSD. For instance, it could be a ROM, or something more closely resembling a flashable bios, or who knows what else.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
>What is a floppy disk? It's a 3D print of the Save File icon.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Why don't they just call it a save disk then? Are they printing in rubber or something? /i
- catalogia 7y ago
  I wonder if even this joke is becoming dated. I don't think I've seen a floppy icon in quite a while.
  - PopeDotNinja 7y ago
    I haven't had a CD/DVD drive on a computer in 5 years. I think I might have had a floppy drive in the mid 2000s, but it's been a long enough that I can't remember.
  - teel 7y ago
    May I ask what software you use mostly? I just checked couple of programs I have open on my computer right now and the floppy as save icon is very used still; tortoise svn client, adobe reader, excel, winscp, notepad++, eclipse, all more or less up to date and showing floppy icon. Hell, if someone put me sitting in front of a program I never used before, and said do this and that and save it, and all I was only seeing was picture of usb stick, or ssd drive, or a cloud, without "Save" written anywhere, I am not sure how long I would be looking for the "save" command :)
    - Scarblac 7y ago
      This makes me realise that I go days without using anything besides Firefox, Emacs, Spotify, and terminal windows (with many programs running inside of course but they don't have icons).
    - catalogia 7y ago
      I've managed to find it in calibre and inkscape, although not in audacity, gimp, firefox, emacs, or transmission.
Aperocky 7y ago
> All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk? Interesting, In my quarter century of ripe old age, I distinctly remembered floppy disks from my childhood. My family had a commodity of them for whatever reason, they're everywhere and the best game on the computer was the minesweeper. I guess the news are addressed towards true 21st century born now.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  But you, myself, and most people in here of that age are most likely kids of upper-middle-class parents who actually had computers, back when most office computers were still up to a $10k investment. Floppy disks were around a lot back then, but that doesn't mean kids actually encountered them. I'm 28. My first computer experience was at the age of 6, but most people I knew as a kid didn't touch one until the age of 15. By then, floppies were already gone. I don't think there's any age range that has a majority of people aware of what a floppy disk is. We have magnitudes more tech-aware people than we did back when floppies were a thing.
  - metalforever 7y ago
    What? I am your age. I grew up working class and my parents had a crappy computer they bought at Sams Club with a floppy drive. The neighborhors had one too. I turned in my homework with floppies. Most students (working class) had one in the house, but a lot of the time the computer was rather ancient.
- fastball 7y ago
  Interesting. I don't remember using floppies after 1999.
  - robin_reala 7y ago
    It’s about the same timeframe for me as well. I definitely used a floppy for BIOS updates and transferring Matlab files in 1999, but a laptop I bought in 2000 didn’t have a floppy drive.
  - 7y ago
fastball 7y ago
SSDs are a lot more reliable than floppy discs. As to crucial infra - you should be using replication anyway, so individual drives failing is somewhat of a non-issue.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
I just had a flashback to early consumer digital cameras that had floppy disk storage. https://petapixel.com/2016/12/12/look-back-digital-cameras-used-floppy-disks-memory-cards/ https://petapixel.com/2016/12/12/look-back-digital-cameras-u...
- tda 7y ago
  I remember when my uncle showed me his Sony mavica. You could just take pictures, take out the disk and put in it your computer and the files where there. Viewing your own pictures on a pc was almost magical, as until digital cameras became common digital pictures were just pretty rare (I only had some stock pictures that came with software). Funny thing I still prefer the "put card from camera in computer" method to transfer pictures with my DSLR
robdachshund 7y ago
Yeah... this isn't exactly an upgrade. Tapes can last 50+ years, which is what floppy disks are made from. SSDs might last 10 if you are lucky?

djohnston 7y ago

Anecdotally, I'd estimate 10% of floppy disks I purchased were DOA, and about 0% for SSDs. Would be curious for more rigorous data

rinchik 7y ago
Yep. Floppies were not reliable at all, but cheap, disposable, and very convenient (during those times). My point about SSDs was not about SSD vs floppy, but about SSD vs some other modern tech. e.g. super secure proprietary tape storage.
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Tape? More reliable than SSD? I thought you said you were old? Jokes aside, the best reliability is probably more redundancy. Take a few SSDs, write the same data over and over (multiple times on each). If more than 50% agree, then its legit. You can increase the reliability by arbitrarily increasing the redundancy in this case.
  - carlmr 7y ago
    >Take a few SSDs, write the same data over and over (multiple times on each). If more than 50% agree, then its legit They may all fail at the same or very similar time if you write the same data to them
  - azernik 7y ago
    Tape is still used for archival purposes, as it has very long shelf life (i.e. longevity when not under heavy usage) and low cost per byte of storage (fancy electronics go into the R/W machine and the library hardware, not the tapes). AWS Glacier (https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/) was built to replace on-premise tape libraries, and while no one knows exactly what storage medium they use, a tape library is one of the possibilities given the pricing model (cheap storage, expensive retrieval) and retrieval delays (on the order of hours, unless you're willing to pay extra for on the order of minutes). Other possibilities I've heard thrown around include I/O-poor NAS boxes, and a tape-like mechanical library of optical disks.
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      I recall reading somewhere (pretty sure it was actually here) that Glacier used some sort of custom low-RPM spinning rust that could be spun down when not in use and otherwise took very little power.
      - azernik 7y ago
        No one really knows - there have been leaks saying multiple contradictory things over the years, which leads me to believe they're experimenting with a variety of storage technologies.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
More anecdata, but my experience was that as floppies became less common (around 2000-2005?) the quality control got way worse if you just got a random box of them from Office Max or wherever.
- djohnston 7y ago
  that's interesting, i was purchasing in early 2000's so that lines up
AdrianB1 7y ago
Up to around 1995 I had about 0 defects. Later the quality decreased until around 10-20% defects.
- topspin 7y ago
  That was my experience. I used (and not gently) hundreds of 5.25" floppies in the mid to late 1980s and had very few problems. Wore out drives, but the disks lasted forever. At first 3.25" disks were very good as well; it was normal to install a commercial software product that was distributed on a half dozen or more 3.25" disks that would all work perfectly year after year. Later quality dropped off and floppy media became rather unreliable. I can only imagine how reliable a mil spec 8" drive with mil spec media must be.
  - AdrianB1 7y ago
    The 5.25" disks were much more reliable than the 3.5". I had plenty of bad 3.5" after I used it a lot, but almost no bad 5.25" disk. Not sure if it was related to the areal density, rotational speed, head distance - I've seen scratched 3.5" disks quite often. I still have a 8" disk in my desk's drawer, but I have no reader to check it. It is probably still good more than 25 years after the last time it was written (I have it since ~ 1992).
- tropo 7y ago
  I was about to make this comment with the exact same year. In 1994, the low-end brands went bad. By 1995, all brands were bad. A few years later, the drives started to be bad.
Spooky23 7y ago
That was the late 90s and early 2000s when the manufacturing was off-shored and hired out. I rehabbed my dads old IBM XT a few years ago, 10/10 new in box 5.25” floppy disks were in perfect condition.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  Yup all my Apple ][ floppies are still readable. I formatted them between 1985-1990. Most of the CDROMs I burned in the 2000s are bad, no matter how much I spent on the blanks.

fennecfoxen 7y ago

> Oh my! I feel sooo old now! I've handled 5.25" floppies on old computers (running DOS and old, old, ~~Mac~~ Apple operating systems), but 8" floppies specifically are an extra level of ancient and hard-to-find.

bitwize 7y ago
Macs have been using 3.5" floppies from the word go. Were you using after market drives? Early prototype Macs?
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  You're right, it was more Apple II (or similar) than Mac. The brands have blurred in my mind with time!
antod 7y ago
My high school computer lab (barely/rarely) ran off 8" floppies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1 The dozen or so computers were "networked" to a shared storage unit (Proteus?) that consisted of two 8" floppy drives. Not that we got our own disks or anything - they were more of a permanently mounted NAS/SAN. We'd probably average a couple of hours class time per year on them, so not very effective. This was 5 years or so after I'd already used 5.25" floppies on a TRS-80, and about the same time 3.5" ones were used on early Macs and Amigas.
- vmlinuz 7y ago
  My school computer room had a single old machine which took 8" floppies, entirely unused and gathering dust in a corner, when I started computer studies in the late 80s, and a room full of 5.25"-equipped BBC micros... By the time I left, the BBCs had largely been replaced by semi-IBM-compatible RM Nimbus PCs with 3.25" drives. At home, on the other hand, I spent a while with an Amstrad PCW - running CP/M from 3" floppies!

russdill 7y ago

One of the nice things about SSDs is that they can be designed to exacting specifications of reliability and longevity.

jcadam 7y ago

Huh, floppies have been gone that long? Back when I was doing my BSCS (1998-2002), we turned in our assignments in a folder containing a printed code listing and a 3.5" floppy disk - there were better ways to move small amounts of source code around even then, so I suspect it had something to do with some of the more eccentric CS professors insisting on using old machines (I saw old 68k UNIX boxen (including NextStations) in some offices). I actually don't think I used floppies much anymore after college. Most of the new hires we get these days say they turned in coding assignments by pushing them to a git server. The US Government had a big thing for ZIP drives for a while. Saw those in wide use when I entered the defense contracting world in the late 2000s.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
> [...] The US Government had a big thing for ZIP drives for a while. Saw those in wide use when I entered the defense contracting world in the late 2000s. I love this statement. Because to me Zip drives died around the year 2000-ish from a regular consumer usage perspective.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Government IT: Yesterday’s stuff, tomorrow.

jeffdavis 7y ago

"Solid state digital" is a fairly generic term, and the actual device may bear little resemblance to what you think of as an SSD. For instance, it could be a ROM, or something more closely resembling a flashable bios, or who knows what else.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

>What is a floppy disk? It's a 3D print of the Save File icon.

ethbro 7y ago
Why don't they just call it a save disk then? Are they printing in rubber or something? /i
catalogia 7y ago
I wonder if even this joke is becoming dated. I don't think I've seen a floppy icon in quite a while.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  I haven't had a CD/DVD drive on a computer in 5 years. I think I might have had a floppy drive in the mid 2000s, but it's been a long enough that I can't remember.
- teel 7y ago
  May I ask what software you use mostly? I just checked couple of programs I have open on my computer right now and the floppy as save icon is very used still; tortoise svn client, adobe reader, excel, winscp, notepad++, eclipse, all more or less up to date and showing floppy icon. Hell, if someone put me sitting in front of a program I never used before, and said do this and that and save it, and all I was only seeing was picture of usb stick, or ssd drive, or a cloud, without "Save" written anywhere, I am not sure how long I would be looking for the "save" command :)
  - Scarblac 7y ago
    This makes me realise that I go days without using anything besides Firefox, Emacs, Spotify, and terminal windows (with many programs running inside of course but they don't have icons).
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I've managed to find it in calibre and inkscape, although not in audacity, gimp, firefox, emacs, or transmission.

Aperocky 7y ago

> All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk? Interesting, In my quarter century of ripe old age, I distinctly remembered floppy disks from my childhood. My family had a commodity of them for whatever reason, they're everywhere and the best game on the computer was the minesweeper. I guess the news are addressed towards true 21st century born now.

scrollaway 7y ago
But you, myself, and most people in here of that age are most likely kids of upper-middle-class parents who actually had computers, back when most office computers were still up to a $10k investment. Floppy disks were around a lot back then, but that doesn't mean kids actually encountered them. I'm 28. My first computer experience was at the age of 6, but most people I knew as a kid didn't touch one until the age of 15. By then, floppies were already gone. I don't think there's any age range that has a majority of people aware of what a floppy disk is. We have magnitudes more tech-aware people than we did back when floppies were a thing.
- metalforever 7y ago
  What? I am your age. I grew up working class and my parents had a crappy computer they bought at Sams Club with a floppy drive. The neighborhors had one too. I turned in my homework with floppies. Most students (working class) had one in the house, but a lot of the time the computer was rather ancient.
fastball 7y ago
Interesting. I don't remember using floppies after 1999.
- robin_reala 7y ago
  It’s about the same timeframe for me as well. I definitely used a floppy for BIOS updates and transferring Matlab files in 1999, but a laptop I bought in 2000 didn’t have a floppy drive.
- 7y ago

fastball 7y ago

SSDs are a lot more reliable than floppy discs. As to crucial infra - you should be using replication anyway, so individual drives failing is somewhat of a non-issue.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

I just had a flashback to early consumer digital cameras that had floppy disk storage. https://petapixel.com/2016/12/12/look-back-digital-cameras-used-floppy-disks-memory-cards/ https://petapixel.com/2016/12/12/look-back-digital-cameras-u...

tda 7y ago
I remember when my uncle showed me his Sony mavica. You could just take pictures, take out the disk and put in it your computer and the files where there. Viewing your own pictures on a pc was almost magical, as until digital cameras became common digital pictures were just pretty rare (I only had some stock pictures that came with software). Funny thing I still prefer the "put card from camera in computer" method to transfer pictures with my DSLR

robdachshund 7y ago

Yeah... this isn't exactly an upgrade. Tapes can last 50+ years, which is what floppy disks are made from. SSDs might last 10 if you are lucky?