I'm building my 5 th AMD computer and I'm finding that floppy drives are less and less useful. I don't know if I'm going to bother putting one in this rig. I can boot directly from the CD Rom drive instead.

Floppies are always good for diagnostics, + a lot of hard manufacturer's include drivers on a floppie.

I just renovated a system that does'nt have a working floppy, and its a pain .. yes the system boot from CD, but a lot of the hardware needs floppy.

I find a CD-RW to be better use.

A floppy is always usefull for transfering some word files from computer to computer.. well thats what I use it for anyway!

Floppies are very useful. Word documents, .wma files, smaller things, plus, its faster than burning.

Still need them ;)

Hi.

I dont have one any more, since I got my ibook.

It's really embarassing when somebody says "I'll just bring the floppy with me then" and I have to tell them that I dont have a floppy drive! :(

Asif

I don't have floppy anymore... and have survived for the last year or so ^^ . The trick I guess is that if you have drivers, download it from the internet, and burn it to cd. That's what I do.

I recently moved all the components of my system from its original case into a much better case and didn't move the FDD too since I never use it. Combined with the fact that my iBook (or any Mac) doesn't have a FDD I haven't used one in months.

I still have and use floppies for diagnostics... :eek: Heck, I've even considered putting a 5 1/4 drive in because I have some programs I'm still quite fond of. However I don't use floppies for swapping files. I use smartmedia, or network to exchange files and such.

I use mine, but it's only for a couple of files - personal information mostly that I wouldn't store on a computer with direct access to the internet. It just gets popped in when I need the info, then popped out again. Quicker than a CD, or a zip disk

Greg Moore

IMO, the floppy drive will never die.

And yes, I still use the floppy disk (ie, transferring images, IE Favorites :), and word docs).

I can use my computer without floppies, like 99.9% of the year with out it. However, when there is something wrong, or I buy a new part, you need the drive for the drivers, and sometimes to do a quick computer to computer transfer, which doesn't have internet, it's necessary.

They will always be used I think.

They're pretty cheap. Compgeeks have them for $8.95.
Or get an external you can run off USB, although that wouldn't help if you need to use diagnostics.

I use my floppy for mostly installing drivers :)

For my designing world, I use them, as some people snail-mail me some info on floppies.

For my SysAdmin world, I use them to load drivers, run diagnostics, startup disks and so on.

For my personal world, I do not use them.

I still have mine just in case... I don't use it very often, but you just never know...

You guys are right, I don't use it much but it's nice to have. It's almost a no-brainer for $8.00 or so and besides most cases have the slot for a floppy built right in. :idea:

I dont use them. I have one universal boot CD-R I made a long time ago that has every utility I could ever need. Windows or unix, doesnt matter. I would need probably 80 floppies for all the stuff I have on there.

It also has things liek policy editors and things like that. Its my "swiss army knife" of computing and a floppy just wont cut it. I stopped using a floppy drive 4 years ago.

If the rackmount/chassis can take a floppy use one it's better to prepare for the worst and hope for the best :). As you may always have a critical need for a floppy.

Two of my 3 main computers have floppies but thje only time I can ever remember using them is when installing Win2k.... :)

I dont trust floppies after losing a few school projects a long tiome ago :) Now i use CDR CDRW or FTP :D

Rarely use floppy but it's there if you need it. So no big deal to me.

I have a floppy on both my desktops and my laptop. It's rare that they're put to work, but I'm keeping them...just in case.

the last time I used floppy drive was to boot the red hat Linux on dual partition, I made and bootable cd of that floppy and now no more I use that floppy ;)

also, new OS like windows xp is very smart and recognize almost all hardware so no drivers are required, and also I haven't seen any manufacturer including floppies with hardware, because CDs cost much much lesser then average floppy cost.

I have better suggestion, why not replace floppy drives with 1.4 mb ram chips, like we have pen drives (upto 1 gb) which directly connects to USB port or fool the floppy drive (A) and stick some other drive on it which can act as an floppy drive. because, imo, floppies are useless anyway, they have 100% corruption rate and whenever I have purchased a 1.44 floppy drive I have always got atleast 2 floppies with bad sectors.

imo, floppy sucks it should be replaced with some better medium because now days you will find 1.4 mb memory in your watches. :rolleyes:

If you still have material on floppies, you need a drive to read them. I've got a lot of floppies I used for backup on my first laptop, which didn't have a CD drive. (Toshiba Satellite 105, bought in 1996 for $2,000. P75, one of the first pentium laptops.)
Yes, I do need to move all that to CDs but haven't gotten around to it.
That project is right up there with cataloging 10G of digital photos.

Originally posted by web docta
I'm building my 5 th AMD computer and I'm finding that floppy drives are less and less useful. I don't know if I'm going to bother putting one in this rig. I can boot directly from the CD Rom drive instead.

Put one in trust me. You'll be glad later.

I use a floppy for virus removal, boot disks, and for partioning, formatting and copying drives.

I don't use them often but I do use them for boot disks, drivers, etc.