Why do computers still have floppy drives?

[DeeBye]

I was staring at my year and a half old computer just now, and I realised that I have never, ever used the floppy drive that it came with. Frankly, I don't even know if it works or not.

The last time I used a floppy disk for anything meaningful was when I was in college and I had to save some AutoCAD drawings for a project, and that was 8 years ago. I haven't used a floppy drive since.

Personally, I can't even imagine a situation that would prompt me to use my floppy drive. If I need to transfer a sub-1.5 MB file, it's insanely easy just to e-mail it to a webmail account and open it on another computer. For large files, CDR or FTP is where it's at.

The only circumstance that I can see a floppy drive being even remotely useful is for computers that don't have a CD burner and that don't have an internet connection. For the home PC market, that's an incredibly insignificant number. So why are new PCs still equipped with floppy drives? It seems like such a waste to me.

[Nomad25055]

Greetings,

Dang. I can't think of one reason why computers still have floppy drives. In fact I have only ever used my floppy drive a total of 1 time. And that was for backing up some Diablo characters (only reason for it then was because I was formatting my hard drive and these were my first ever characters, and I wanted to save them in memory of my first excerpt into the Diablo universe). Maybe floppy drives are still around because they are all a part of a big conspiracy to take up space in our cases? We may never know :ph34r:

Nomad25055 :huh:

[Chameleon]

Floppy drives still exist for a few reasons.

The only circumstance that I can see a floppy drive being even remotely useful is for computers that don't have a CD burner and that don't have an internet connection. For the home PC market, that's an incredibly insignificant number. So why are new PCs still equipped with floppy drives? It seems like such a waste to me.

As a canuck from the Big Smoke, I understand why you feel like this but I know personally, several people that fall into this situation.

1. Elementary school children: the computer in school are frequently antiquated, and not connected to the internet. All of a student's work is saved on a floppy issued by the school (often kept at the school, as virus protection proceedure).

2. The low home user; not refering to the quality of the computer but as to the user's understanding of the computer itself. The user just doesn't know how to use email with attachments correctly; and don't even try to explain how FTP works to them.

3. The user is at work, and connected to the internet and prohibited from visiting certain domains, such as hotmail, yahoo, etc.

Now, I know that some of the examples don't seem to coniside with the home market for new computers but the users are the same in both markets. Thus, they want to do things the way they know how not learn something "new" and potentially "unreliable".

Edit: completely forgot this

I used to own a laptop that didn't have floppy drive, nor did it have CD burner. On several occasion, usually when I was out and about, thus, not connected to my home network, I was frequently saying to myself, "I wish this piece of junk had a floppy."

[Moldran]

Hey! Floppy drives are important ! :P

My DSL router is an old 486 running fli4l, a special Linux distribution that completely runs from a single floppy. I need the floppy drive in my main computer to create a new boot floppy for my router when I change the configuration once every few months.

I voluntarilly work in an Internet Cafe which provides access to computers and the net for very small fees. Most of my "customers" are underprivileged young people who don't have a computer at home at all, or only a very old one, and most of them don't know very much about using it. I frequently give floppies to the kids there so they can carry their data from the Internet Cafe to computers at school or other places. Burning a CD for every small text document would be a waste, and many of the kids don't have an email account. Also, it is often better to have the data on a physical media rather than to send it via email, not only for users who don't know how to deal with email attachments.

Floppy drives do have some important advantages:
Compatibility. Yes, my main computer is a modern machine with a CD burner, Internet access, USB ports, etc. But what do I do if I need to transfer data from this computer onto an old machine which does not have all that nifty stuff ?
Reliability. Internet access, USB, CD burners, etc, need a relatively complex OS that provides the drivers to access them. A floppy drive is accesbile under pretty much every small, basic OS which itself can be run from the floppy drive. When your machine is in a broken state, you sometimes do not have access to the network or devices like USB sticks or a CD burner. The floppy drive can be a real lifesaver in these situations. When all is broken, the floppy drive works ;-)
And floppy drives are cheap. A brand new one costs around 5 - 10€ in Germany. There is no reason not to include them in modern computers.

[ShadowHM]

Burning a CD for every small text document would be a waste, and many of the kids don't have an email account. Also, it is often better to have the data on a physical media rather than to send it via email, not only for users who don't know how to deal with email attachments.

I have four children in school. Many assignments are saved to floppy disk and taken to school or to another kid's home to add their contribution. And I am NOT going to receive attachments from the friends of my children. Most of them do have internet access and many of them display a distressing lack of discrimination about viruses.

Further, I still have a (gasp) old 386 still functioning in this home. It stands alone as a wonderful word processor, but there are occasions when internet research is required to make a teenager's project finished. A floppy disk carries the text/picture files over rather nicely to the old computer for finishing the assignment of an evening, leaving me free to indulge my D2 addiction at the same time. :P

[Bob]

And, they're cheap (granted, they're getting more pricey now) but last time that I bought some, they came in at a little over 10p each. Now, CDR's can be had for this too, but they're 1-use only. If you have to make several revisions, you don't want to go through 1/2 a pack of CDR's at 10p each. CD-RW's are more pricey.
As someone said, compatability. If I need to get something onto someone else' computer, I put it on a floppy, why? Because I know that their computer has a floppy drive. Most people can read CDR, but I don't have a writer. Not everyone can read USB memory sticks (unless you have XP, you have to carry the driver install disk with you anyway), ZIP disks, 'hey, look, just let me plug this hard-drive onto a spare IDE cable'. Floppy disks also work in safe mode, unlike just about everything else - if you need backups of your system files a floppy is the best place to keep them.

Floppies have a few weaknesses:
Size, 1.44 Mb is too small for a lot of today's uses
File system, I don't know all the ins-and-outs of it, but I understand that the FAT16 system that floppies use is rubbish
durability, there's just so much stuff that will mess them up.

Unfortunately nothing can be done about the third problem, and the other two would likely require everyone to have a new floppy drive, which defeats the purpose, really. (Actually, I'm not sure about the file systems, that might just require a revision to operating systems to make them read it properly, anyone know?)

The floppy has been a very useful addition to computing, and is still handy today for a lot of 'work' based stuff. They've been a permanent fixture on every PC for the last decade which gives almost complete compatability, and I know that I'll continue to use them for file transfer until text files get bloated so that you just can't cram anything onto the disk (er...).

-Bob

[--Pete]

Hi,

I mean, how else am I going to reload Castle Wolfenstein or one of the old Gold Box D&D games if I get in a nostalgic mood. Not that I've done either for seven years or so. Probably wouldn't run on the new boxes anyway. :)

Only reason I can think of is to flash the BIOS -- AFAIK, that cannot be done by booting from a HD or CD.

--Pete

[Baajikiil]

mean, how else am I going to reload Castle Wolfenstein or one of the old Gold Box D&D games if I get in a nostalgic mood. Not that I've done either for seven years or so. Probably wouldn't run on the new boxes anyway.

Heh, Wizards of the coast released several collectors editions of the Gold Box games on CD several years ago(I think the collectors sets don't even come with a translation wheel though, shame on them).

It is possible to play them on modern PCs, but you need to use a program that forces your comptuer to use very few of its resources. Their are several commercial ones, and free ones, but it often takes a large amount of tweaking to get any of them to work properly.

[[wcip]Angel]

Obviously, you need a floppy drive. Otherwise there'd be a gaping hole in the front of the cabinet. In addition to looking hideous, it would be an opening for dust, soda, pretzel-shrapnel and other specimens which could seriously damage your beloved's internal organs.

:P

[Artega]

The benefits outweigh the costs.

Floppies work in Safe Mode.

I'll be damned if I'm going to waste an expensive CD-R or CD-RW just to transport a single Word document, when I can use the faster-and-easier floppy.

Many schools use floppies as opposed to internet transfers or CD-Rs, because you can format and virus-check a floppy's contents much faster and much easier than can a CD's or internet file's.

You can't flash your BIOS with a CD.

You can't make a startup disk with a CD.

USB devices don't function in DOS.

So, yeah, spending those $10 on a 3.5" Floppy is a good move.

[Nystul]

When I built my computer a year or two ago, I bought a shiny new floppy drive strictly in case I needed to flash BIOS with it. I don't think I've used it, ever. But it cost me about $5 new, shipping included. At that price, it's hard to make a good case against them (other than the bay space they consume, but one can always take the thing back out).

Surely the same can be said for major manufacturers. If it's costing them about $2 plus a minute amount of added labor to put these in, and a large percentage of customers still at least think they might use it for something, it has to be there.

[--Pete]

Hi,

You can't make a startup disk with a CD.

Depends on what you mean. Most modern BIOS support boot from CD, so you can make a boot CD. Given the size of most bloatware and what you "need" to run a modern system, the boot floppies do things like make a virtual drive in memory to uncompress all the stuff they need. A boot CD can be ready to go. Indeed, some "real" OSes can actually run off a CD since non Microsquish programmers understand the difference between system files and temp files, a difference millionaires (not to mention billionaires) seem to find mentally challenging. Almost as challenging as the distinction between a system file and an application. But I digress. :)

--Pete

[Quark]

Many motherboard/computer manufacturers have utilities to flash without boot disks now. ASUS has a program that will automatically check for updates and set up a re-flash with a simple reboot. Unfortunately, I tried it once back when I had Win98 and it didn't work :P Had to use a laptop to create a floppy and try it from there.

Dell's BIOS updates are simple executables that have always worked for me (we use it all the time at my Help Desk), so there are working examples out there ...

[DeeBye]

I'll be damned if I'm going to waste an expensive CD-R or CD-RW just to transport a single Word document, when I can use the faster-and-easier floppy.

CD-Rs are dirt cheap though. I know I can get them for about the same cost of 3.5" floppies, and in many cases they are cheaper.

I also find it faster and easier to burn stuff to CD as opposed to using floppies. It seems to take forever to copy 1.5 MB to a floppy disk. I also think that CD-Rs are a lot more reliable than floppies, especially these days.

I guess the only problem is that it seems like it's a waste of space on a CD-R to just use it for small files, but quite frankly that's never bothered me much.

[Munkay]

The curse of a large university is when the internet connection goes down, it goes down. It often takes a few hours before anything is figured out (which mostly takes a few hours of deliberation before a reset button is pressed :P).

Often times this left me stranded without a way to print papers (though I configured my roomate's printer to allow me to print through the network by the end of the year) so i turned to my beloved cd-r. Not just any Cd-r, Open CD 2002. Yup, this puppy's been kicking around since my brother and I swapped Baldurs Gate II save files back and forth. By burning a single 'open' cd-r, and keeping track of it, I've never had to hassle with a floppy. This is not to say I don't believe in the value of the floppy drive, but for general file swapping the open cd-r has been ideal.

The last time I checked Open CD 2002 is almost full (mostly due to transfering digital pictures from the computer illiterate down the hall, which are convinced they know how to send attachments but they magically *never* actually arrive ;) )

But at any rate, I've found that with one single Open CD-R, I've never hassled with a floppy. Burning never takes longer than 45 seconds, and I've haven't delt with trying to figure out my fried floppies from good floppies in years.

Am I the only one?

[Bob]

It seems to take forever to copy 1.5 MB to a floppy disk

That would be because you can't get 1.5Mb on an uncompressed floppy :D

-Bob

[Jarulf]

With the latest computer I got, I specifically told them to not put in a floppy drive. I hade to do some pursuation since they insisted it would not reduce price since they are so cheap but in the end they agreed. IN any emergency, I can always rip out a floppy drive from an old computer case I have somewere. For moving files today, I usually use some sort of USB memory stick.

[jahcs]

CD-R's are dirt cheap. If you shop the ads in the newspaper you can find rebate specials that occasionaly make them FREE. (After a short wait for the rebate to arrive. ;) )

I keep a floppy drive in my computer just to confound my girlfriends college friends. They will come over and say "What the #$%^ is wrong with your zip drive? My disc won't fit."
All the labs at the college have zip drives installed on the machines. Luckily my girfriend knows how to access her storage space (and her friend's) on the school's network from home.

[FunkyfooKarate]

its one of those gotta have it things

[FunkyfooKarate]

hey bob you can also set up cdrs to be burned on multiple times
like multistageing i currently do that, i have about 20 prodjects on the same cd from a year ago, and still 400 mb or so left to my use, works fine :P