| 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 | | | |
|
| 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. | | |
| ... |
 |
| ... |
|
| ... |
| |
