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I still think no portable media exists that has the convenience and expense of diskettes. The closest are Flash Drives, but they are still rather expensive whe

by jmclnx 2y ago

I still think no portable media exists that has the convenience and expense of diskettes. The closest are Flash Drives, but they are still rather expensive when compared to diskettes. Many times in the past I would give or mail people a diskette and never expected it back. I also know a couple of lawyers that will give their clients a Flash Drive with documents on them as opposed to using email. To bad one cannot buy a pack of sat 1G or 2G flash drives at the same cost that a pack of 10 diskettes use to to cost.

LegitShady 2y ago
if it fits on a disk I can just email it to you, or email you a link to cloud storage download. The cost of doing this is essential $0. Diskettes are just obsolete.
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bbatha 2y ago
You absolutely can though. A 50/100 pack of 1GB flash drives is about $1.50 a drive on amazon. I looked at historical prices of floppy disks which were about $0.5 a diskette in 1990, or about $1.20 in today's prices. If you go down to a 512MB flash drive the prices are identical.
- deleted 2y ago
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fuzzythinker 2y ago
Shouldn't SD cards be more a substitute of diskettes than flash drives? Most PC/laptops have SD slot and those who don't certainly has a SD reader. It's most likely cheaper for the same density and definitely less carbon footprint.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  It's really hard to find almost any device (except a phone) that doesn't have a USB-A port. Laptops still usually include at least one, and various other devices that you might need to copy files to/from (such as RasPi) have them too. It's the closest thing to a universal port that currently exists. SD cards just don't have this ubiquity. Lots of laptops do not have an SD slot, so you have to use a separate reader dongle that plugs into... a USB-A port. Even worse, what's an "SD card"? Do you mean the large kind, or the microSD card that some phones still use for extra storage? So even if your laptop has a full-size SD slot, if someone gives you a microSD card, you're out of luck unless you happened to carry a microSD-to-fullsizeSD converter, or a USB SD reader.
kalleboo 2y ago
It was a huge failure on the part of OS vendors that CD-R never became that. The ISO9660 file system on CD-Rs was specifically designed so that you could add on sessions to a disk that "deleted" or "modified" files on earlier sessions, so that an OS could just present a CD-R as a huge floppy and it would work seamlessly until the disk ran out of space to append new data to. Then they failed again with DVD-RAM, which was also basically a gigantic optical floppy disk. (Personally I stopped using floppy disks in around 1998/1999. Before going to school I'd start an upload of the document I needed to my ISPs 10 MB of FTP space on my 56k modem at home before leaving, and by the time I arrived at school, it was done. This was still more reliable than using floppies.)

by jmclnx 2y ago

LegitShady 2y ago

if it fits on a disk I can just email it to you, or email you a link to cloud storage download. The cost of doing this is essential $0. Diskettes are just obsolete.

deleted 2y ago

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bbatha 2y ago

You absolutely can though. A 50/100 pack of 1GB flash drives is about $1.50 a drive on amazon. I looked at historical prices of floppy disks which were about $0.5 a diskette in 1990, or about $1.20 in today's prices. If you go down to a 512MB flash drive the prices are identical.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

fuzzythinker 2y ago

Shouldn't SD cards be more a substitute of diskettes than flash drives? Most PC/laptops have SD slot and those who don't certainly has a SD reader. It's most likely cheaper for the same density and definitely less carbon footprint.

shiroiushi 2y ago
It's really hard to find almost any device (except a phone) that doesn't have a USB-A port. Laptops still usually include at least one, and various other devices that you might need to copy files to/from (such as RasPi) have them too. It's the closest thing to a universal port that currently exists. SD cards just don't have this ubiquity. Lots of laptops do not have an SD slot, so you have to use a separate reader dongle that plugs into... a USB-A port. Even worse, what's an "SD card"? Do you mean the large kind, or the microSD card that some phones still use for extra storage? So even if your laptop has a full-size SD slot, if someone gives you a microSD card, you're out of luck unless you happened to carry a microSD-to-fullsizeSD converter, or a USB SD reader.

kalleboo 2y ago

It was a huge failure on the part of OS vendors that CD-R never became that. The ISO9660 file system on CD-Rs was specifically designed so that you could add on sessions to a disk that "deleted" or "modified" files on earlier sessions, so that an OS could just present a CD-R as a huge floppy and it would work seamlessly until the disk ran out of space to append new data to. Then they failed again with DVD-RAM, which was also basically a gigantic optical floppy disk. (Personally I stopped using floppy disks in around 1998/1999. Before going to school I'd start an upload of the document I needed to my ISPs 10 MB of FTP space on my 56k modem at home before leaving, and by the time I arrived at school, it was done. This was still more reliable than using floppies.)