7 ms·
You vastly underestimate the production gap between those two drive types. There were likely at least a couple of orders of magnitude more 3.5" drives in use i
by blihp 6y ago
You vastly underestimate the production gap between those two drive types. There were likely at least a couple of orders of magnitude more 3.5" drives in use in their time than 5.25" drives were in theirs. I remember my last 5.25" drive costing ~2x more than a 3.5" drive in the mid-90's. Also, widespread 5.25" drive usage ended 10-15 years before 3.5" drives were superseded by flash.
3.5" was also the last widely used removable magnetic disc and used by virtually everyone for a time for backups, in all kinds of industrial devices etc the way microSD cards are today. Sure, there were Zip disks etc. but those were typically add-on devices and had a degree of compatibility issues vs 3.5" drives which were standard equipment for well over a decade whether you wanted them or not. So the majority of computer users from that era (as well as any still in service equipment) are most likely to still have, and possibly need replacements for, 3.5" drives since they most likely switched over long ago and have been a rapidly dwindling replacement market vs 5.25" which was pretty much dead by the early 90's.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fingerlocks 6y agoWow. Zip Disk really takes me back. A highlight of my childhood was sneaking a pirated copy of Doom 2 on a zip disk and secret installing it on a school computer. That game was like four 3.5" disks otherwise, not easy to conceal.
- smoyer 6y agoMy ex-main server has ZIP, JAZ and DAT all on the front panel.
- ineedasername 6y agoDAT! I'd pretty much forgotten them-- in my first post-college job I had to manage a backup system that used them, swapping them each night before I went home. It really hammered home the importance of backups when someone completely hosed a database and I had to restore things.
- de_Selby 6y agoIt actually saddens me to have 5 1/4 bays on my computer that are completely unused nowadays. There's not even any point having a dvd burner anymore.
- daniellarusso 6y agoYou can use one of the panels to mount a 12v cigarette lighter from an auto parts store. https://www.autozone.com/lighters/universal-cigarette-lighter/victor-products-illuminating-complete-cigarette-lighter/3286_0_0 https://www.autozone.com/lighters/universal-cigarette-lighte...
- smoyer 6y agoMy desktop has a 2 5-1/4 bays ... one has a DVD R/W and the other has a 16-function SD, compact-flash ... interface.
- colejohnson66 6y agoAs someone who didn’t grow up with floppy disks, why were floppy drives topping out at a few megabytes, but Zip drives managed a hundred in the same size? It’s quite a jump in capacity.
- kenny11 6y agoAdvancement in technology, just like a CD tops out at 650 MB but a Blu-ray disc can store 50 GB on the same-sized plastic disc.
- codeulike 6y agoBetter/more fine control of the read-write heads leading to more dense information storage. Floppy discs used a stepper motor, Zip drives used something more like a modern hard disc actuator, see https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-actuator https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-actuator
- pmiller2 6y agoThis is mostly it. The floating head, plus the much smaller head size is what allows a more dense packing of tracks per inch on the disk. It's almost like having a mini HD where the platter is removable.
- ineedasername 6y agoplatter is removable I remember repairing discs by swapping to the shell of a new one when something like the mini spring broke.
- pmiller2 6y agoHah, fair enough. I suppose I should have said "designed to be removable." :)
- rainbowzootsuit 6y agoI had SyQuest 105MB and then later iomega Zip drives. The SyQuest cartridges had a translucent shell and it was a shiny metallic HDD platter in there while. When you put in a platter you got a whole sound of the HDD whir to spin up and then clackity-clack when the heads loaded and started moving around. Always a little tension until the drive mounted. I think the Zip used more of a brown plastic type of disk. The loading was more of a low chunck-chunck sound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology
- Seanambers 6y agoI'd go as far as to say that 3.5" floppy's were much more widespread than for instance usb sticks are today and in numbers that has no comparable to this age(thankfully). The world basically ran on it until windows 95 came on a CDROM (also distributed on 13 floppys) and with it the multimedia age as they called it, but still it took a good decade before it was mostly CD/DVD's..
- kace91 6y agoI grew up in the CD era but I still had to use floppy disks for things like school assignments, because disks were far worse for that - burned once, disk lost. Rewritable disks were more expensive, failed like crazy and took a lot of time to burn anyway. I remember that time as particularly annoying. It was a God send to see usb sticks become mainstream, and since everyone had mp3 players on them it meant that you were always carrying a USB stick with you (except for the poor souls that had ipods, who couldn't treat the storage as a folder for random files and had to use iTunes instead ).
- johnzim 6y agoYou definitely could do that to my recollection, I remember doing so to ferry files around. Here's an apple support doc showing how: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544
- silly-silly 6y agoThis was not a viable option pre 6th gen.
- LukeShu 6y agoIt was if you ran ipodlinux instead of the stock OS!
- silly-silly 6y ago