Floppy Disk Zombie Technology

Please note that this entire page is somewhat dated; storage technologies have advanced so rapidly and USB flash has become so pervasive that most of these arguments are simply no longer valid.

From ZombieTechnologies:

Which brings me to my Zombie: floppy disks and tapes. Or really any rewritable magnetic media on a plastic base. Specifically this excludes ordinary hard disks or other magnetic media on metal. But 3.5" disks, DAT tapes -- why aren't they gone yet? Well a couple of possible reasons. One might be that CD burners are more expensive and slower than say DAT drives, and hold less. True if you are backing up 348GB you'll use a lot more CDs that DAT tapes, and DATs are reusable. So capacity issues are still there. Price and speed are subject to change.

-- StevenNewton

Some people still don't have a high-speed network connection, but wish to move small (< 1.4 meg) files from computer to computer. Some people work on operating systems, and need an easy way to test new kernels. Some people like using data storage that looks like it was on StarTrek (the original, not ST:TNG (which appears to use memory sticks (aren't SONY making these now?))).

SneakerNet is not dead!!! ;->

There's also the fact that some (even modern) PCs won't boot from a SCSI CD-ROM unless you've got a floppy disk drive -- the SCSI card masquerades the CD as a floppy disk (in line with the El Torito spec), but the BIOS doesn't even look at it, because there's no floppy disk drive.

WirelessIsTheSuccessorOfFloppy

Plenty of people - myself included - have work PC's that aren't fitted with anything else, and use ancient PC's at home. I need to do little but transport Word and Excel files to and from home, as well as a few random files I work on at work.

I don't have Internet at home because I don't want it. I do not have the need or use to pay another $30-60 a month for another pointless piece of technology. It'd be really neat if some larger storage medium became standard, but overall, corporate America just doesn't seem to be that interested in giving us all JAZ drives. USB smart drives seem to be hitting the mainstream. 256MB or 512MB versions are cheap.

Floppies are universal. The interface to floppies is standard, and implemented by every BIOS. They are big enough for most files. They are cheap. I use them. I sound stupid.

These days, they aren't big enough for many files. With the latest version of office, etc. you have to be very careful to not go over 1.4Mb on a non-trivial file.

As of 2014, floppy drives are the exception, not the rule, in small-office-home-office (commodity and/or whitebox, in other words) computers, whereas UniversalSerialBus ports are standard, plentiful, and supported by every OperatingSystem people still use. In addition, a UsbKeychainDrive (what most people call a thumb drive) is cheap enough most computer users can buy them by the handful, and they have gigabytes of reusable storage on them.