Another Nail in the Floppy Drives Coffin

[Dos_Box]

From the Beeb: BBC News - Sony to stop selling floppy disks from 2011

Sony has signalled what could be the final end of the venerable floppy disk.

The electronics giant has said it will stop selling the 30-year-old storage media in Japan from March 2011.

Earlier this year Sony stopped selling the disks in most international markets due to dwindling demand and competition from other storage formats.

The slow death of the "floppy" or "diskette" began in 1998 when Apple decided not to include a floppy drive in its G3 iMac computer.

Since then various other firms have stopped support for floppy disks, including computer giant Dell in 2003.

Computing store PC World stopped selling them in 2007.

However, Sony has continued to sell the disks, and continues to ship them in the millions.

Now, the firm - which claims to have produced the first 3.5in (9cm) disks in 1981 - has decided to halt sales completely faced with competition from online storage and portable USB drives.

How many people here I wonder still have floppy based install disks for some 'essential' curriculum software? More importantly, how many here have had disks thrust upon them by teaching staff after they purchased floppy based software in the past 5 years?!

[andy_nic]

Some more post in this one. Death Knell Of The 3.5" Floppy Disk To Be Rung Soon [It Says Here]

Boxford DT software and some Machines being picky from what they will boot ghost off, so we only have 2 bits of software needing FDD at this school

[ICT_GUY]

I still use floppy boot disks to create images that are used to creat ghost boot cd's.

[Jamo]

Anyone using CC3 will still need floppys.

I have to say though, I was a little shocked that it did still require them!!

[localzuk]

We have no remaining needs for floppies here. We don't actually have any fat client machines with floppy drives any more, only old re-used machines which are set up as thin clients.

We did have a requirement for floppies in the form of our CATS results being mailed to us via floppy disk for the last few years, but we have now moved to online testing instead.

I still use floppy boot disks to create images that are used to creat ghost boot cd's.

What version of Ghost are you using? The last bunch of versions have all had built in ISO cd creation capability.

[CHR1S]

Havent used a floppy for years, didnt know you could actually still buy them lol!!

[Rydra]

RM CC3 uses bucket loads of them. It has a tendancy of killing the disks, and they never behave after CC3 has killed it.

[JJonas]

also on the BBC News technology page BBC News - The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk

So maybe not quite dead yet

[3s-gtech]

I still use them, where some servers refuse to install Windows (even with newer versions) without the SATA/RAID drivers. Very rarely though now.

[ICT_GUY]

Virtual Floppy Drives

I just created a boot cd using old ghost and a virtual floppy drive, much quicker too.

You may have to run VFD as an administrator BTW.