Sony prepares to stop manufacturing floppy disks

With another nail hammered into its coffin, the venerable floppy diskette continues its creeping but inexorable end as Sony announces the company will no longer sell the 28 year old digital storage medium in Japan.

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12 million sold? Wow! Who would still be using these?

12 million disks sold?? I wonder who buys them any more, although I think some vendors still sell floppy readers with their systems.

With Windows 2003, XP when you add a 3rd party driver, it wants it from a floppy drive. For older hardware there are times when you need a floppy, though we have not purchase any floppy disks in years, just using old ones we have laying around.

There are a lot of legacy systems hidden in many large corporations that take floppies. Old version of Ghost (version 8 or so) of consumer and enterprise both use floppy disks for the bootable media. On older machines you can't boot to USB drives so you need floppys if the item is not on CD.

But why is Japan using so many floppies? Japan's infrastructure is MUCH more modern than U.S. and they would not have so many legacy systems to justify the purchases.

Floppy discs and agp will never die lol. Since 2004 I haven't even included a floppy drive in any of my machines. Used to temporarily have one to load a raid driver in windows xp. Now vista and 7 allow CDs, DVDs, and Flash Drives for that.

I'm still hanging on to a a couple of diskette drives in case I'll one day have all the time in the world to convert my Amiga diskettes to images using Disk2DFI. Of course, that day is unlikely to come, and current motherboards don't even support two drives, which are required for the trick that enables reading these diskettes. Maybe it's time I got rid of them.

Bought an N Wifi Stick for my PC and the driver came on a Floppy disc. Stupid as I don't have a floppy drive. Alot of Drivers for Hardware still come on a floppy.

I thought this had already happened years ago. I'll bet it's been 5-6 years since I last used a floppy.

I think i the last 10 years or so I have only had to dig out a floppy twice. Both time it were to flash a BIOS on an older machine. And very rarely (maybe once every 2 months) does someone wander into the print shop I work in with data on a floppy disk.

I remember in grade school tho every kid had to have a 3.5" floppy to store any files on b/c the school didn't have a file server to do it. U just prayed your floppy didn't get corrupted when it had your 8th grade end of the year project on it .

Be damned! Up until now, I didn't even THINK about floppies, let alone consider the fact that 12 Million in 2009. And Japan of all places accounted for 70% of those sales. They're such a weird country. Just when you think you have them figured out.

Indeed, Jibberish. One of the most technically advanced countries and they are still using floppies.

2002 was the peak year? That seems too recent... Guess I should pick up a pack to keep on hand sometime soon before everyone quits making them.

All I can say is . . . goodbye to an old and trusted friend (the floppy).

Way to go floppies! Had some awesome memories with ya...think I still have some old school games saved on them too somewhere =P. But after getting my first USB drive in 2001 I never turned back. I did try out Zip Disks for a while which I thought were pretty neat.

Ha, my school was the same...fun times when someone infected the whole lab with a virus and spread it to everyone, almost as fast as our cafeteria staff spreading the flu lol.

End of floppies? Sad day!
Remember when we used to trick them into holding more than the native 360k/720k/1.44M? Then after (or before) on read/write cycle, they would fail.
Now hardware seldom fails, that task has been taken over by software.
Happy days.
From guest: "jayesstee".

Used one today

The funny thing is later today after reading this story, I needed a floppy. OK, I could have gotten around it however I had a system that needed a BIOS update (OS was toast and I needed BIOS update to get PXE boot to work) and I used DOS with BIOS image on a floppy, which upated it just fine.

Last time I used a floppy was to get my RAID setup to work during a Windows XP installation in 2006.

I agree with an "OLD" part and definitely do not agree with "TRUSTED" part...