Sony Killing Off Floppy Disk Production in 2011

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
I'm in a weird position because our machine shop has 5 Okuma CNC turning centers that use a proprietary floppy disk format to store files. One the machines is less than 3 years old. There is absolutely NO way around using 3.5" floppies to store files. The files can't be sent over the network because they don;t mesh with anything Windows. I even tried replacing a floppy drive with a compact flash floppy emulator with no success. I guess I'm gonna have to stock up on disks! :/
 
[citation][nom]JasonAkkerman[/nom]People still use these things? [/citation]
No word of a lie, I fixed the computer of a friend's sister and she had a panic attack when I told her that the floppy died (it didn't but we had to lie to her to get her to give it up) and she simply would not get the idea of a USB drive until I actually trainer her in its use. Ya, it's time to get rid of this obsolete, archaic technology.
 
I stopped using those 10 years ago. And I don't miss the days when a disk would go bad after minimal use. In my experience, ZIP disks are even worse.
 
[citation][nom]slickyfats[/nom]Haha. I am currently working (at work) on a machine that has Windows XP with a DVD reader/Cd Burner a 3.5" drive AND a 5.25" drive. We use the 5.25 and 3.5 way more than we do CDs. Sucks for my boss. Ouch actually sucks for me. He is 68 and will more likely close than update.[/citation]
Really the major thing that demolished floppies is the prevalence of cheap usb thumb drives. Why would he be opposed to those, they're essentially the same exact thing but with infinitely more space lol. CDs destroyed floppies in general but floppies still held some advantages over it, but thumb drives just blow them both away.
 
[citation][nom]Snipergod87[/nom]I meant to comment on this. Problem with Zip disks is you needed a Zip drive, CD-ROM drives were much more popular to be found espically since then had been used in the recording industry. Zip disks also had reliabilty issues compared to CD's[/citation]
Zip drives also put out a high pitched whine similar to a dentist's drill.
 
um every customer I have, backs up their machines using NTBACKUP which requires a FLOPPY to restore the data.... smooth move Sony. No wonder you keep losing money hand over fist...
 
[citation][nom]techguy378[/nom]Zip drives also put out a high pitched whine similar to a dentist's drill.[/citation]
I work in an Engineering and Survey office. We have 3 PCs that use DOS still to hook up to our data collectors and run AutoCAD10. The main PCs, except mine (he had me build 6 yrs ago) and my bosses, are running windows 95 with AutoCAD 2000. The software and hardware work fine for what we do. I have never gotten a thumb drive to work on the Win95 machines. Heck the Win95 machines only have 2Gb hard drives. For file transfers we use "SneakerNet"
 
I find that they make great dust collectors...LOL that is what mine have done for the better part of the last decade. Although I have had to blow one off to get some raid drivers for an XP build about 3 years ago.
 
My first job was in a small PC builder PC repair shop. To this day, the owner of that shop is STILL including floppies in his new machines.

Until they're forced, some people will avoid change at all cost.
 
[citation][nom]slickyfats[/nom]I have never gotten a thumb drive to work on the Win95 machines.[/citation]That's because Win95 doesn't support USB. :) I'm looking forward to 3.5 drives going away... of course, I'm also looking forward to parallel/serial ports going away and also using an SATA converter on legacy ATAPI devices so we can get rid of the PATA connector as well. Upgrade everyone... (I'm sure I'll get flamed for that...)
 
The real question:
What will happen to the letters A: and B: ?

We need to reclaim them somehow. With 2 local hard drives, 4 drives for my multi-reader, 2 optical drives, 6 network drives (office computer) and plug in 1 or 2 usb sticks (double for stupid U3 paritition), and that is 18 letters - 2 for A: and B: . Only 6 letters left.

Free A: and B: !
 
I remember the days of having to strip out backgrounds from ppt presentations just to get them to fit on a floppy disk. Then don't even get me started on the countless times the disks would randomly "fail" with some important bit of data on them.
They served their purpose, and they'll make good wall decorations, but flash drives are the proper holder of the throne now.
 
LOL I play with a few old rigs I have dual P3 tualatin setup and an Old P3 slot Rig I mess with here and there. I was at a garage sale a week ago and this lady had a box of 100 3.5 floppy disks I bought them for $1 LOL I only needed 1 to flash a bios and now I have 149 floppy disk if any one needs some PM me I will be more then happy to send a few LOL.
 
Oh no. No more disks for my work Sony Digital Mavica 640 x 480, 10x optical zoom, Digital Still Camera pn MVC-FD71 sn 115652. Even the original Lithium battery is still good.
 
[citation][nom]ctbaars[/nom]Oh no. No more disks for my work Sony Digital Mavica 640 x 480, 10x optical zoom, Digital Still Camera pn MVC-FD71 sn 115652. Even the original Lithium battery is still good.[/citation]Ha! I remember that camera - my buddy had one. I thought it was the coolest thing at the time: saving digital images to removable media. Now I have a microSD card in my phone that holds almost 3000 times as much data as a HD (high density for you young-ens) floppy.
 
"The real question:
What will happen to the letters A: and B: ?

We need to reclaim them somehow. With 2 local hard drives, 4 drives for my multi-reader, 2 optical drives, 6 network drives (office computer) and plug in 1 or 2 usb sticks (double for stupid U3 paritition), and that is 18 letters - 2 for A: and B: . Only 6 letters left.

Free A: and B: !"

B can be assigned easily. Not sure about A, never tried. My main desktop, as powerful as it is, still has a floppy drive.
 
[citation][nom]slickyfats[/nom]I work in an Engineering and Survey office. We have 3 PCs that use DOS still to hook up to our data collectors and run AutoCAD10. The main PCs, except mine (he had me build 6 yrs ago) and my bosses, are running windows 95 with AutoCAD 2000. The software and hardware work fine for what we do. I have never gotten a thumb drive to work on the Win95 machines. Heck the Win95 machines only have 2Gb hard drives. For file transfers we use "SneakerNet"[/citation]

Long term archiving of data on optical disks or flash memory is IGNORANT. Any sense at all will tell you magnetic media is the only solution for long term archiving. I'll tell ya, there's some youngsters here that know not what they comment. Zip disks are noisy because they are old. Hard drives of that era were noisy too. As far as capacity goes, there's no reason at all why a zip disk/drive couldn't be modernized to hold more data than a blue ray...for that matter, a 3.5 floppy drive could probably be upgraded to the same if sony really wanted to do so.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom