Minor Glitches and Floppy, RIP?

[stevemb]

My desktop appears to dislike connecting the external drive through a front USB port; I got a BSOD. I suspect that it might be a port power issue or resource conflict. Another ongoing issue is that the boot cycle stalls at the "searching for USB mass storage devices" stage unless the all-in-one unit (a Canon MP830) is turned off during the boot. On

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I got an external floppy drive for my Mac three or four years ago on the chance that I might need to access some old floppies. All I ever actually did was to experiment with it.

[dglenn]

"How long has it been since anybody else actually used a floppy disk?
"

About three months ago,for me. Would've been within the last week, if the machine I wanted to take files from had had a floppy drive (the destination machine does). And a floppy drive would've really, really come in handy about two months ago (I very nearly installed one from my stack of spares).

I don't have a good replacement for floppies yet. Thumb drives are too expensive to use the way I used to use floppies, CDs can't be written on every machine where I want to write to portable media, and aren't as reusable as floppies (and given the type of drive I've got in what few of my computers can burn a CD at all, not reusable at all for me).

From my point of view, doing away with floppy drives was premature. Inevitable, yes, but too soon because a really suitable replacement isn't in place. (If thumbdrives drop a whole lot in price, they'll become suitable; they aren't yet, at least not where I've seen them sold.)

[stevemb]

"Thumb drives are too expensive to use the way I used to use floppies"

I occasionally see someone selling batches of 32-64 MB thumb drives cheap, presumably wanting to clear them out because there's little demand for those sizes anymore. If you like, I'll keep an eye out.

[poltr1]

I last used one about two months ago, while trying to transfer files from my laptop to someone else's laptop. Mine's too old for a flash drive (unless it's 256 Mb or less).

[catalana]

I used one to back my grades up regularly until about July when I moved and the floppy that used to live half in my disk drive disappeared. Now I back up to my flash drive. (It's just slightly less convenient because the USB ports are lower on the computer and hence more likely to get covered with...stuff. Papers, bills, whatever else is on my desk.)

[selki]

I think the last time I used a floppy drive was when I was checking to see if I could read some old backups of resumes, so that would probably be around 2003.