I miss them in the sense that they were useful back when we had smaller files to store. It was never exactly hard to get a nice hard case to put one’s floppies in and keep them safe.
They probably stuck them in the bottom of a school bag full of books or something. What should I have expected? I think that’s probably what the people who say they were unreliable did. No doubt it was jostled and smashed by the things in the box. I only ever had one go bad and I know that I left it out on a messy desk for years then it spend a couple years in the bottom of a box of stuff that didn’t get unpacked from moving. Some people here claim that floppies were unreliable. It’s effective but kind of pricey.Īnd I know. The only good way I know of to back anything up these days short of giving in to the cloud is to buy an external hard drive.
The new ones are so small though sneeze and you might never see it again. I haven’t really tried to use them that way. I guess I could replace the crystal but really? Maybe SD cards are better. My understanding is that’s because they are built with cheap oscillator crystals.
More recently it’s been USB sticks and they just randomly stop working. After floppies I had so many CDRs go bad sometimes only months after burning them. But I do miss having a removable media that I could save something to and be pretty close to 100% confident that when I return to load it again it will still be there. I wouldn’t use floppies for anything today because obviously their storage space is far too small. “but it can be difficult to find those who regret the passing of the floppy disk” Posted in Arduino Hacks Tagged arduino nano, floppy disk, floppy emulator Post navigation One of the machines that may have issues is the Amiga, but fortunately there’s a fix for that with a Raspberry Pi. He freely admits that it’s not a perfect cycle-exact emulator of original hardware and there may be machines or even operating systems that complain when faced with it, but for all that it is a useful tool. Most of the Arduino’s lines drive the floppy interface, so the five-button control comes to a single ADC pin via a resistor ladder.
But what about today, when there’s a need for a real floppy drive and none is to be found? Enter, with an Arduino Nano based floppy emulator, that plugs into the floppy port of a PC old enough to have one, and allows the easy use of virtual floppy disks.Īside from the Nano it has an SD card and associated level shifter, and an SSD1306 i2c screen. These flexible magnetic disks in hard plastic covers were a staple of computing until some time in the early 2000s, and their drives could be found by the crateload in any spares box. Among the plethora of obsolete removable media there are some which are lamented, but it can be difficult to find those who regret the passing of the floppy disk.