A floppy drive can be necessary for BIOS flashing and booting in DOS If you get a nasty virus or a corrupted boot line in your HDD.If you use older programs that were made in the DOS,Win 3.1,Win95 era they may only save to a floppy. Floppy is also good for saveing files like Word doccuments,Excel spreadsheats,and other files that need to be transported from one computer to another but are too small to waste a CD on.You should defently keep your floppy.If air flow is a problem replace the ribbon with a round cable.