SSDs over 163  current & past oems profiled
SSD news ..
consumer SSDs guide
consumer SSDs ..
hard disk drives
hard disk drives ..

StorageSearch.com

enterprise buyers guides since 1991

storage search
"leading the way to the new storage frontier"

Floppy drives

. Floppy
Megabyte never forgot what
he put on his floppies.
SSD news
SSD history
Online Backup
Storage History
How Solid is Hard Disk's Future?
History of Enterprise Disk to Disk Backup
floppy disks - history and artistic pics - article on designboom.com
How will the hard drive market fare... in a solid state storage world?
Nibble: Floppy Drives Market Softens..................................
Does anyone still use floppy drives?

Nearly all the data I exchange with my colleagues goes via email, and I can still remember getting a nasty virus from accidentally leaving a floppy in my PC years ago.

Yes, I was using anti virus software at the time, but it did take a couple of hours to get rid of it. Friends I know say that their kids are very good at stuffing food into PC orifices such as floppy slots and DVD drawers. So maybe it's time for the industry to create a new type of non invasive portable storage connection for the generation of the future. Or is that called web storage?

Today's interchangeable portable storage devices tend to be Flash Memory sticks and cards connected via USB. Unlike the standard 3.5" floppy, which was designed to fit into an HP engineer's shirt pocket (that was before Dilbert was invented - but you get the idea) today's solid state storage devices will fit in your camera or a key ring, and typically contain 100 times as much storage as a standard floppy.

You may find it difficult to believe that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in Apple IIs and the original IBM PC, the operating system would fit onto one floppy, while the software application such as the word processor, would fit ontp another. On a single floppy drive PC you would have to plug floppies in and out each time you changed application. As drives got cheaper the market started to produce PCs with two floppy drives. But the high volumes of the PC market eventually enabled hard drive manufacturers to achieve cost of scale economies which drove down the cost and made them affordable by consumers.
.
Another industrial SSD company told me that they had designed a electrically and software compatible emulation of a floppy drive to enable a military customer to keep their platforms running.
EOL SSDs - finding new drives for old sockets
some past makers of floppy drives
Accurite Technologies

ALPS Electric Europa

Audavi

Altec ComputerSysteme

Imation

I/OMagic

MicroSolutions

Mitsubishi Kagaku Media

Mitsumi

Samsung Electronics

Sony

SSDL (SSD based emulator)

StorCard

Teac

Toshiba

Winstation Systems
floppy drive dependent legacy assets get operational life extension from a new flash drive
Editor:- September 1, 2016 - SSDL today announced it has launched a floppy drive emulator - FLOPPYFlash (pdf) - which provides electronic emulation at the host interface level for a wide range of historic legacy floppy drives (3.5", 5.25" and 8").

The replaceable media "floppy" is implemented by a 3.5" cassette which looks similar to a floppy but in which the storage media is implemented by industrial CompactFlash card technology.

Editor's comment:- Strange as it sounds there are still expensive legacy systems in which the embedded computers and software rely on the integration of floppy drives for their operation. This is something I've been told by James Hilken, Sales Director of SSDL and others in the EOL SSD support market.

In such systems the availability of field replaceable peripherals saves users a tremendous amount of cost and operational disruption for their connected assets.
...
SSD ad - click for more info
...
...

storage search banner