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Floppydisk.com – a website that still (now) sells floppy disks
- togaen 4y agoIt’s an interesting story: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...
- dang 4y agoThanks! Discussed here: The last person standing in the floppy disk business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32824038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32824038 - Sept 2022 (352 comments)
- selcuka 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32824038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32824038
- sircastor 4y agoI wish I would have known about this a year or so ago. I was cleaning out my fathers stuff and tossed dozens of floppy’s for lack of a better way to handle them.
- cmeacham98 4y agoHopefully this doesn't sound too mean, but "lack of a better way to handle them"? I went on Amazon and searched "floppy reader" and had dozens of hits of external USB floppy readers in the $10-$20 price range (and could probably find one even cheaper if I spent more than 30 seconds looking). Was there something special about these floppies that made them difficult to handle?
- netsharc 4y agoI wonder if floppy disk drives nowadays can just read once at insertion and cache the puny 1.38MB in memory. And have some battery backup to write if the power goes out during unmount procedure (The floppy drives on Macintosh didn't have the eject button and you had to drag the diskette to the trash to unmount it).
- selcuka 4y ago> floppy disk drives nowadays You answered your own question.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoThem being a large bulk of plastic? I don't think the OP was concerned about the contents but of throwing out a bunch of plastic that could have been valuable.
- Blue111 4y ago
- ndiddy 4y agoIf you have weird legacy hardware that needs floppy disks, I wouldn’t buy new media. In my experience most disks made after the mid-late 90s are unreliable and won’t last more than a couple formats before developing bad sectors. I’m not sure why this is, maybe the disk factories stopped maintaining their machinery when sales stopped growing. New old stock disks from the early-mid 90s are definitely the way to go IMO.
- soco 4y agoI can't comment about the new disks, but I'm surprised you can vouch for the 90s. They are magnetic support after all and I'd expect that to degrade rather faster than in a few decades, maybe less the plastic but more the magnetic medium...
- tonypags 4y agoI found an audio tape single from the mid 90s last week and played it on an old tape deck. Sounded great, but I may have nostalgia-bias.
- rmbyrro 4y agoBest part is their floppy to usb drive service: > Then, add the time back to you via USPS first class mail. Not fast enough? We offer expedited and download service at an additional cost. [1] Additional cost to sync a file in Dropbox. Apparently, it's a lot harder than mailing a USB drive. But hey, they sell floppies, what was I expecting!.. [1] https://www.floppydisk.com/transfer https://www.floppydisk.com/transfer
- d-us-vb 4y agoIt could be because they're an enterprise dropbox user, which could be pricy.
- hnthrowaway0315 4y agoOther than retro-computing, what are the more interesting usage of them? Some I can imagine: - Write a floppy disk driver and use them for testing - Research ways to encrypt critical data (for single person, the most critical data probably can be fitted into one 1.44MB floppy) - Anything else?