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Is the Floppy Disk Officially Dead?
I bought a Toshiba laptop in 2003 and I think it was their last model
to come with an internal floppy disk drive.
I've also noticed, that over the last 5 years, the quality of floppy
disks themselves has worsened and
now, in a box of
10 disks, you can expect to find several duds.
So as a portable storage medium
the floppy disk is well and truly dead and its successor is the USB
Flash Drive, invented by IBM in 1998.
Let's be consistent with the
terminology: not a thumb drive or pen drive and definitely not a memory
stick.
A floppy disk can only hold 1.44mb of data.
During its lifetime
there were several attempts to increase this capacity but none caught
on.
It's now hard to buy a flash drive with less than 256mb of storage
and you can get one with a capacity of 4gb for under £30 - that's as
much data as a DVD can hold.
Capacity-wise and cost-per-megabyte the flash drive is streets ahead of
the floppy disk.
Flash drives are physically robust with no moving parts and should
survive a cycle in a washing machine.
They require no special device on a PC to read them as they plug into
the ubiquitous USB socket and can transfer data at up to 400mbps.
Flash
drives should therefore work in the vast majority of PCs going back as
far as
Windows 98, as well as Linux computers and any Mac with a USB
socket.
They match and extend the role of the floppy disk and so there's
no reason to persist with floppies.
I admonish people I see still using
floppy disks and point them in the direction of flash drives.
A flash
drive should not, of course, be the only place where important files are
stored, but this warning applies equally to all forms of data storage so
far invented.
There's some debate as to whether the data on a flash drive can be
corrupted by airport
X-ray machines and flash memory, which is at the
heart of flash drives and all other memory cards, does have a couple of
Achilles Heels that you should be aware of:-
1 - |
Under ideal conditions the data stored on a
flash drive will still be readable after 10 years before all the
electrical charge, that represents '1's and '0', leaks away so it
should not be considered as a long-term storage device. |
2 - |
A higher voltage is required to write flash
memory than to read from it and each write operation slightly
damages the flash memory cell.
Each cell can only survive a
finite number of erase/write cycles before failing.
In early
models this was 10,000 but modern flash drives quote several
million erase/write operations although the time required for
each cycle gradually increases.
The true safe limit is thought to be
around 100,000.
The number of read operations is unlimited.
If
an "instant on" PC was made using flash for its main memory it
would start to fail within a day or 2.
If you used flash memory
for a shared network drive it might work OK for up to a year but
it's too risky to consider.
For "floppy replacement" use it's hard to get
anywhere close to 100,000 erase/write cycles.
Maybe it's a good
idea to retire all flash memory devices, used in cameras, mobile
phones and mp3 players after 5 years use. |
Floppy disks have
another role besides portable storage and this is to boot computers
which are having a problem booting normally or to initiate a Windows
installation onto a blank hard drive.
Sure, you can boot a computer from
a CD or a flash drive but bootable CDs are technically challenging to
make and only the most modern computers have a BIOS that supports
booting from a flash drive.
I therefore recommend that, for the
foreseeable future, you still include a floppy drive in servers. You can
get a floppy drive that also has slots for all the common flash memory
cards which can be useful.
My next laptop won't have a floppy drive so
I've bought myself a USB floppy drive and a few packs of quality brand
floppy disks while these are still available.
In my line of work I keep coming across technology I thought was dead,
such as Windows 98 PCs, so I'm sure to have the need to make bootable
floppies for many years to come.
For normal users I recommend abandoning
floppy disks without delay and copying any data you may have stored on
old floppies to a CD.
For disaster recovery purposes, don't worry
that you can no longer buy a PC with a floppy drive but instead get
yourself one of the many free or commercial rescue CDs that can boot
your PC independently of the hard drive to allow you to fix problems with the Windows system or just copy important data
from the hard drive to safety, usually onto a flash drive.
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