Floppy Disks Discontinued

[Demon_Skeith]

In 1981, Sony brought the world the 3.5-inch floppy disk, which for nearly two decades would stand as the PC world's preferred means of storage. In 2011, after 30 years on the market, Sony will cease production of these disks.

Despite the advent of superior mediums like CDs, DVDs and flash drives, the format lived on well into the 21st century both for owners of older PCs and Macs and for storage purposes, many people's old documents, images and most importantly games still taking up megabytes on floppies the world over.

The time has finally come, however, for Sony, the 3.5-incher's creator, to pull the plug, disclosing the decision to end production earlier this week.

source

I thought they stopped making these years ago.

 

[Spiritwarrior]

I've predicted this outcome since the USB flash drives were first released.

I still got some new floppy disks saved up, because I gave up saving college documents on them two years ago, and because most PCs no longer have floppy drives and had to get flash USB drives.

I'd save those floppy disks if I were you, because if you have documents saved on them, you can always go back and access them again in the future.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

now would be a good time to go out and buy a lot. Sometime in the distant future they could have a good collectors price on them.

 

[froggyboy604]

I used floppy drive up to 2004 since I used to find USB drives kind of expensive and I had a bunch of old floppies lying around.

But, In 2007, I start using USB drives because I got one for free from my sister.

 

[Black Angel]

Damn..that has got to suck for college students.. when I was in school, and the professor wanted your test, he wanted your disk as that was where you saved your work to. (the test was in 2 parts..) first part was on paper and the second part was electronic.

I always preferred to had in on the floppy as I was not about to give up my thumb drive.

 

[froggyboy604]

These days I think some colleges in Canada just use E-mail or some sort of forum like software like moodle to ask students to send their exams, and assignment. I think students can just use Burnable CDs which cost about 0.20 cents (100 Pack CD-R for 20 bucks) if their laptop or school computer has a CD burner.

But, I can see you point of handing over a USB drive to a teacher. One of the problem with USB is they don't have those white labels which Floppy drive have where you can write your name, class, and what's in the drive like a Floppy Label, so it will be difficult to figure out which drives belongs to who, and I can imagine how frustrating it will be for the teacher to figure out who wrote the exam if there is no name on the document since he can't recognize students hand writing in a word file, but he probably eventually find out who wrote it by the spelling mistakes, grammer, and writing style of the exam.

It is sad that the Floppy Form Factor does not exist anymore since I found it to be pretty good. Floppies are harder to lose then Flash Drive unless you forgot to eject it from a PC. Plus, I can just put them in my pocket of my zippered binder or the little floppy pocket built-in to my backpack.

I kind of dislike USB thumb drive since they always get lost in my pocket, and I have to unmount/eject them from the PC when I'm not using them on the PC.

I notice some USB drive are kind of big and hard to pull out or insert in the USB ports. I always worry about bending the USB connectors.

Plus, it is very easy to lose those little caps for the USB connectors on the PC.

This is one of the reasons I prefer External hard drives since I don't have to worry about lossing a USB flash drive cap or the entire drive, and I hardly leave the house to go use a computer when I'm out.

It is also easier to get my files back if the USB fails, but not the SATA or IDE drive on the External hard drive since I can just get a screw driver and open the external drive case, and install the drive into my desktop pc or another case.

 

[Kisame]

those things always screwed me over anyways.
i'd be carrying to to school and accidentally scratch it or something.
then when i got to school it wouldn't work.

 

[NBK*Twitch]

Wow they are finally no longer being made... I remember tweaking them to old twice the amount.