Do you have a zip/floppy drive?

[dani_17]

Hi all!!,

here goes the poll. Do you have a floppy disk drive or zip drive or other similar storage medium? I have 5 computers at home and don't have a single floppy/zip drive. In my opinion it's a prehistoric technology. Come on! I want to see those comments and those weird post!! JSR, you sure use floppy disk right?

 

[poertner_1274]

I have a floppy, so I can get into dos mode and do some things I can't do in windos itself.

They are helpful for transfering small files between 2 places not networked or on the internet at all.

 

[LNCPapa]

I have both on a couple of my machines.

 

[PuterGeekGirl]

Just got a new laptop, no floppy, fine by me.....I don't use it much anyway....always have the cdrw if needed!:grinthumb

 

[Justin]

On most of my older machines, I have working floppy drives. However, I only use one of my old machines, a 366mhz celeron box, with a floppy drive - The rest (about 25 or so) are not being used by me.

Of all my newer machines, none of them have floppies - Some did, but I've since removed them. They have caused me nothing but hell and grief. I hate floppies with a passion.

I have many older machines that still work good with them though, lots of 5 1/4 drives as well as 3 1/2, and I do have a number of tape drives... but no zip drive.

IMO, floppy technology is simply too unreliable and too prone to decay, damage, and other such things to be feasible at all.

I think we should switch to flash-based "floppy" technologies - All machines coming standard with a front-mounted flash reader. Lightweight, fast... just not cheap (yet).

 

[agissi]

floopy here, but i never ever use it =\ My next computer defently wont have a floopy, because they're "out"

 

[pbspike]

Have a floppy and an external zip. Use the floppy mainly for quicken backups. Zip used with my old school, not anymore since i transfered to Devry and they don't use zip.

My main method for moveing files out of my house is email, web, or soon those 128Mb thumb storage devices that fit on your keychain. (what do they actually call those anyway )

 

[StormBringer]

I still put a floppy on every machine I build for myself. I have a couple of machines that also have ZIP drives. I also have two external ZIP drives, one is a Parallel ZIP100, the other is a USB ZIP250

I have 4 250MB disks and 10 100MB disks. When I wear those disks out, I doubt I'll ever use the drives again. The price of the disks are still almost what they were when the drives first came out.

As for thew floppy, there are still way too many times when a floppy comes in very handy.

 

[dani_17]

I normally use cd-rw's. I find it cheaper and a lot more reliable. Also 1.44mb is useless for almost anything. I now bough a 128 usb memory stick.. also don't know how the call it. It's quite handy. An it's also quite compatible since almost anything has windows 2000, xp or me.

 

[SNGX1275]

When I'm at my parents house I use floppies/zips all the time. My dad's mac is running MacOS8 and doens't have a cdrw drive, but it has a zip and a floppy. They work great for transferring word or excel files, and zips can be used for scanned images and larger office files.
To counter the CDRW argument -
1. still much slower to write a small file to a CDRW, you have to fire up the burning software or have it continually loaded like that DirectCD crap, or use windowsxp's thing - all take longer than it does to write a <100KB file on a 1.44 or a >1Meg file to a zip.
2. the things scratch easier than talc it seems.

 

[agissi]

Originally posted by SNGX1275
2. the things scratch easier than talc it seems.

Just keep it in a case

Originally posted by SNGX1275 1. still much slower to write a small file to a CDRW, you have to fire up the burning software or have it continually loaded like that DirectCD crap, or use windowsxp's thing - all take longer than it does to write a <100KB file on a 1.44 or a >1Meg file to a zip.

When writing a small file, WinXP's burn thingy takes the better part of 30 seconds...Ok, a floopy takes 10