4 ms·

Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copy

Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storage options. They're definitely not something you'd want to keep around as archival media or anything but they served very well for the best part of 3 decades, and the main reason we moved on was because users started needing to store large images and video. I still rather like floppy disks.

tjoff 5y ago
Speed. And, while they can be robust they are often not. One of the problems are misaligned drives. Where you will have robust use of them on one machine, and robust use on another machine. But if you take a disk written in one it can't be read in the other. Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.
- ncann 5y ago
  Back when I still used these I remembered they had horrible life span - I would take a new disk out from the box, wrote some files to it, then months later when I tried to read the disk I was unable to do so, with the disk drive making constant cricket sound.
- iypx 5y ago
  > Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem. I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive. In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    I constantly had failed floppies. I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers) Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common
    - ghaff 5y ago
      There was definitely a period, at least with 5.25" disks, when name brand disks like Verbatim definitely tended to be more reliable than cheap disks bought in bulk. The latter weren't that bad (usually) and it often still made sense to use them so long as you were extra-careful with backups. In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.
jandrese 5y ago
They are also tremendously slow, somewhat fragile, prone to media decay, and extremely difficult to source replacement media in 2021. Replacement drives are also somewhat hard to find. Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > prone to media decay Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.
  - wolrah 5y ago
    My old floppies are great. The newer ones, starting around 2000 or so, are mostly junk.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I haven't bought a floppy since 2000, so I wouldn't know!
  - pxx 5y ago
    ... and I have had 3.5" floppies that have lost data by taking them for a five minute walk a block away. 40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      I just recently went through around 300 floppy disks -- 3.5" HD mostly, but also some 5.25" 360k and a few 3.5" DD. All dating to 1985-1995. Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted. This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out. The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?
santoshalper 5y ago
Extreme unreliability, terrible speed, tiny storage, dearth of available equipment. The reasons not to use floppy disks for anything that matters are numerous and clear.
WalterBright 5y ago
USB sticks are better in every respect.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  USB sticks also require an open USB port which can be used for all kinds of attack vectors that you just don't have to remember hardening against with a floppy.
- tadfisher 5y ago
  Except security. Floppies can't do anything other than storage, but USB devices can be just about anything.
  - glandium 5y ago
    The story doesn't say much about what kind of computers are used, but the floppy drives could just as well be USB ones...
- serf 5y ago
  I never had a floppy fake an HID.
alerighi 5y ago
They are not reliable at all. And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  I found it depends upon the make. The windows 95 floppy are good. Only linux in CD-ROM at that time. Both work ok.
crispyambulance 5y ago
> [...] and you can design your own format if you want to. Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!? This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade. It happens though, there was a story some years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527
- jfim 5y ago
  > This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.

tjoff 5y ago

Speed. And, while they can be robust they are often not. One of the problems are misaligned drives. Where you will have robust use of them on one machine, and robust use on another machine. But if you take a disk written in one it can't be read in the other. Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.

ncann 5y ago
Back when I still used these I remembered they had horrible life span - I would take a new disk out from the box, wrote some files to it, then months later when I tried to read the disk I was unable to do so, with the disk drive making constant cricket sound.
iypx 5y ago
> Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem. I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive. In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  I constantly had failed floppies. I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers) Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common
  - ghaff 5y ago
    There was definitely a period, at least with 5.25" disks, when name brand disks like Verbatim definitely tended to be more reliable than cheap disks bought in bulk. The latter weren't that bad (usually) and it often still made sense to use them so long as you were extra-careful with backups. In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.

jandrese 5y ago

They are also tremendously slow, somewhat fragile, prone to media decay, and extremely difficult to source replacement media in 2021. Replacement drives are also somewhat hard to find. Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.

WalterBright 5y ago
> prone to media decay Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.
- wolrah 5y ago
  My old floppies are great. The newer ones, starting around 2000 or so, are mostly junk.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I haven't bought a floppy since 2000, so I wouldn't know!
- pxx 5y ago
  ... and I have had 3.5" floppies that have lost data by taking them for a five minute walk a block away. 40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    I just recently went through around 300 floppy disks -- 3.5" HD mostly, but also some 5.25" 360k and a few 3.5" DD. All dating to 1985-1995. Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted. This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out. The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?

santoshalper 5y ago

Extreme unreliability, terrible speed, tiny storage, dearth of available equipment. The reasons not to use floppy disks for anything that matters are numerous and clear.

WalterBright 5y ago

USB sticks are better in every respect.

DocTomoe 5y ago
USB sticks also require an open USB port which can be used for all kinds of attack vectors that you just don't have to remember hardening against with a floppy.
tadfisher 5y ago
Except security. Floppies can't do anything other than storage, but USB devices can be just about anything.
- glandium 5y ago
  The story doesn't say much about what kind of computers are used, but the floppy drives could just as well be USB ones...
serf 5y ago
I never had a floppy fake an HID.

alerighi 5y ago

They are not reliable at all. And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.

ngcc_hk 5y ago
I found it depends upon the make. The windows 95 floppy are good. Only linux in CD-ROM at that time. Both work ok.

crispyambulance 5y ago

> [...] and you can design your own format if you want to. Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!? This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade. It happens though, there was a story some years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527

jfim 5y ago
> This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.