Dell saying bye to floppy disk drives AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) -- In what may be the wave of the future, Dell Computer said goodbye to the past on Thursday when it announced it would stop making floppy disk drives standard equipment on its higher end desktop personal computers. Austin, Texas-based Dell, the No. 2 personal computer maker, said floppy drives had been overtaken by technologies offering greater storage capacity and would become an option on its Dimension 8250 models. Other Dell models may lose the floppy by end of the year, depending on customer response, Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca said. Alternatives offer more storage He said the decision was made because technologies such as USB flash memory offer much more storage capacity than floppies and are more useful with today's mega-memory computers. "You insert it right into the USB port, and your computer reads it just like it would read a floppy drive. The benefit is, you've got much more capacity -- instead of just 1.44 megabytes, at the low end you have 16 megabytes." The floppy drive has been the most widely used method of transferring data between computers since the dawn of the computer age. The first 5.25-inch floppy drive was introduced by Shugart Associates in 1976 to be compatible with International Business Machines mainframe computers, then made the transition to IBM's early personal computers. Sony introduced the 3.5-inch diskette in 1980, and by the early 1990s the 3.5-inch floppy, with a capacity of 1.44 megabytes, had become the standard method of data transfer in PCs. Tens of millions of computer users are familiar with "the a: prompt" as the symbol for the floppy diskette. Research leads to decision In the early days of computing, hard drives of 10 to 20 megabytes, the capacity of a few floppy disks, were common, and the size of computer programs was often small enough to fit on one or two floppies. But even today's less expensive computers include hard drives one hundred times larger, and most programs are too large to run or store on a manageable number of floppy drives. Menchaca said the decision to eliminate the floppy drive came following focus group research with customers. "When we would ask the question to people 'do you need a floppy,' the answer to that question would be yes," he said. "But when we asked them how long it had been since they used it, they would say six months, a year. Many couldn't remember the last time they used the floppy drive." Apple leads the way Dell says the floppy will first be phased out on higher end computers because those users are more likely to be utilizing flash memory, portable hard drives, and other alternative portable storage devices. Apple Computer stopped putting floppy drives in Macintosh computers several years ago, but other PC firms, including No. 1 personal computer maker Hewlett-Packard, still offer them.
I had to read that thread title 5 times before I got it right. When I started reading this thread I was like ,"Oh no, dont take away my floppy drive!"... then it hit me. I havent used a floppy drive since my last formatting of my hard drive..... 8 months ago. Im gonna miss you floppy drive.... our days of Doom and Links Golf were good, but all good things must come to an end.
Nice thread title, made me think that there was some sort of BTTF.... thanks! This kinda sucks though, especially when you are rebuilding a PC and need to FDISK or FORMAT. DOS is still cool. I guess bootable CD's are the answer, but I will miss my floppy...
This is actually a good idea, unless you are so stuck in the past you are still using the origonal floppy disks, I mean the 8 inch babys that couldnt store anything on them.
Since you don't even need a floppy to do a clean install of Windows anymore, I can't think of a reason why I would ever need a floppy drive. I still have a few disks in my desk, but I don't know why. Everything that is on them is also on CD and Zip.
I plan on keeping mine because its nice to have when you want to have a few files in your possession without wasting an entire CD. Plus the burn process takes a lot longer than transferring to a disk. Seeing as how ZIP and JAZ drives never caught on, I rarely use either of mine. I can't put files on a ZIP/JAZ disk to transport and expect all other computers to have ZIP/JAZ drives
I still use them when I'm putting just a few documents to take to school or something, or using a computer that's not hooked up to the internet.
Yeah, I use mine for papers all the time. The machines at school don't have USB ports. Time to buy a printer, I guess.
Whats a floppy drive? Are you windows users still running betamax? Trade in your 8 tracks, we now had these things called CD's. Apple ahead of the curve again.
Hey now, at least when we had floppy disk drives, we didn't have to wait for the computer to give the disks back to us. All we had to do was hit the eject button.
I havent used my floppy drive since in built my computer over 2 years ago. There is one in my case but i have had no reason to hook it up. It is annoying every now and then when i want to transfer a word doc to my laptop but otherwise i have had no need for it whatsoever. Also, does this really cut cost much to the end user? A floppy drive couldnt cost dell more than $10 to install.
When I bought my Toshiba laptop 2 months ago, CompUSA told me they are trying to phase out the floppy drives, with the popularity of CDR drives and those USB Pen drives. I got a 64MB USB stick for Xmas, and think its more convienent than a floppy drive. I am just waiting for the 1GIG USB sticks to go down so I can buy one.
