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Just speculating here, but floppy disks can be wiped out by a magnet. Not exactly the most robust storage solution. So I would guess this is more about the fri

Just speculating here, but floppy disks can be wiped out by a magnet. Not exactly the most robust storage solution. So I would guess this is more about the friction of moving away from a legacy system, as opposed to the technological benefits of floppies.

Brian_K_White 2y ago
flash wipes itself out just sitting without power for as little as a year, and of course is made out of fantastically complex microscopic electronics. A floppy is ridiculously more robust than that, in the same way paper is even more robust than floppy. It actually takes a very very strong magnet in almost direct contact to alter a floppy.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  I can tell you’ve either never used floppies, or used them so little that your opinion was formed more by luck than experience. Floppies are ridiculously unreliable. They were bad, even when they were brand new in a new drive. Failure rates of one in thirty or so wasn’t unusual. Installing large software packages was a gamble because disc 27 of 33 might have a bad sector and ruin your day. Floppies written with one drive often wouldn’t work in another. The drives themselves would often collect dust depending on how the fans inside the PC case were set up. The drive head would often wear out the floppies, especially if they were used daily (e.g.: boot discs). Keeping them in a hot car in summer could destroy them. I learned about forward error correction (FEC) in desperation when I was in my early teens because it was the only robust way to retain data on floppies for any length of time. There were a whole bunch of compression formats that could split your data so that any n-of-m floppies could be used to recover your data in case a few failed.
  - ripply 2y ago
    Adding to this in Windows 2000 days WinRar had error correcting bits you could enable and make the compressed rar file bigger. I ended up only using that when I would save something to a floppy it was so unreliable.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    I know all of that, having used floppies since the 70's. And those are all other aspects that don't address or invalidate any of what I said.

Brian_K_White 2y ago

flash wipes itself out just sitting without power for as little as a year, and of course is made out of fantastically complex microscopic electronics. A floppy is ridiculously more robust than that, in the same way paper is even more robust than floppy. It actually takes a very very strong magnet in almost direct contact to alter a floppy.

jiggawatts 2y ago
I can tell you’ve either never used floppies, or used them so little that your opinion was formed more by luck than experience. Floppies are ridiculously unreliable. They were bad, even when they were brand new in a new drive. Failure rates of one in thirty or so wasn’t unusual. Installing large software packages was a gamble because disc 27 of 33 might have a bad sector and ruin your day. Floppies written with one drive often wouldn’t work in another. The drives themselves would often collect dust depending on how the fans inside the PC case were set up. The drive head would often wear out the floppies, especially if they were used daily (e.g.: boot discs). Keeping them in a hot car in summer could destroy them. I learned about forward error correction (FEC) in desperation when I was in my early teens because it was the only robust way to retain data on floppies for any length of time. There were a whole bunch of compression formats that could split your data so that any n-of-m floppies could be used to recover your data in case a few failed.
- ripply 2y ago
  Adding to this in Windows 2000 days WinRar had error correcting bits you could enable and make the compressed rar file bigger. I ended up only using that when I would save something to a floppy it was so unreliable.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  I know all of that, having used floppies since the 70's. And those are all other aspects that don't address or invalidate any of what I said.