Sony recently announced that they are going to stop producing floppy disks in March 2011. It seems they’re only halting production to the Japanese market, but humans being what we are have naturally assumed that this means global production will stop. Perhaps it will. Perhaps there’s an announcement about global distribution I missed.
Interestingly, the BBC posted a question asking who still used floppy disks, and got their response. Turns out only a few are legitimate uses. Reading through them, one struck me as most fascinating. One old man who still uses floppy disks because they’re easier to catalogue like a paper filing system. Write a label on them and put them in a flip file. Yep, I used to do that and only a couple of months ago threw out boxes and boxes of Amiga floppy disks, many of them in flip box thingies.
Floppy disks, after going through a few incarnations of varying sizes and capacities from 8″ to 5.25″ to 3.5″, eventually gave way to CDs and memory sticks. A modified version of the media was released called a Floptical, which according to Wikipedia started life as a 21MB disk, but I only remember the 120MB LS-120′s. Maybe the 21 meggers never saw their way into the NZ market. Anyway, they were 3.5″ disks that had different media allowing it the higher capacity.
Then there was Iomega’s ZIP and JAZ drives, which had 100MB, and 1GB respectively, and those were quite popular for a while.
Blah blah blah, OK, who gives a fuck? They’ve all been and gone, past their use-by dates, and the world is a happier place. Well, not completely happy, USB flash drives are sooooooo slooooooowwww..
CD-RW’s and DVD-RW’s can be used as portable, removable media, but I don’t think they’re very reliable. It may be different with DVD-RW’s, but I remember using a CD-RW many years ago as backup media for my docs. After a while, files started disappearing. I don’t know where they went. Maybe the file allocation table was limited, so it started dropping files off the front. I dunno. But it did sour me off that media.
And like the old dude, I’d like to be able to have some kind of “permanent,” or more appropriately, shelvable (is that a word?), rewritable media that I can file. A medium that doesn’t require anything mechanical to operate. CD-ROMs and floppy drives are spinning media, and require lots of moving parts. On laptops in this day and age, that’s unforgivable. Don’t start me on netbooks with spinning hard drives and CD-ROMs..
I’d like to see a “drive” that read some kind of flash memory (preferably bypassing a slow bus like USB — attaching them to the SATA bus could be interesting), about 2″ square — making them big enough to write labels on, and allowing us to file them away. Any smaller just makes labeling them impossible, and handling them difficult.
While Micro SD cards are frikkin awesome feats of technology managing to pack in decent capacity into stupidly small form factors, it’s tough to make them the removable media of choice because they’re so damn small that they’re too easy to lose. Imagine something 2″ square that had the same thickness and data density of a Micro SD card.
That’d be a whole lotta win in my book.
