USB Floppy Drive - What's the use?

[bbhaag]

I had to buy one and still own it to load the SATA drivers before an OS install on my wifes old Toshiba laptop. No matter what I tried I just could not get the stupid thing to recognize any usb stick I used.
I loaded the drivers on a disk that I got from my father in law booted up her laptop and it instantly started reading the disk and loading the drivers when I point the Win7 installer to it. I'm not sure why I keep it around though. That old laptop is long gone.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

See observations I made on a concurrent, parallel thread on the usefulness of optical burners.

Both these threads now raise my attention to the urgency of reviewing my store of old floppies, and an effort to upload them to my server so I can sort, delete and save them -- possibly to optical disc.

If one has several computers, there may be no need to outfit them with either optical or floppy devices, but it's a darn good idea to keep a portable USB floppy or optical drive for these projects to save or salvage old data.

 

[Carson Dyle]

That's crazy that anyone would still have anything of even passing value stored on floppy disk. I have exactly ZERO bytes of data stored on either floppy or optical disk. I have manufacturers' optical software/driver disks, and a number of burned music CDs, and that's about it.

This thread has convinced me to recycle the last of the old floppy drives that I have stashed away in a box. The chances of ever needing to use one again in my lifetime are 1 in a million.

 

[ronbo613]

I still have a floppy drive in an old, but still serviceable computer that is still in daily use. It's been so long since I used it, I don't even know if it works. I had the floppy drive because in my line of work, customers would have them from time to time. I think I have a few floppy discs left somewhere, one of them has the first web site I ever made backed up on it, so it has some nostalgic value, but that's about it.

I would imagine a USB floppy drive would be good to have if you had some kind of media transfer service and wanted to be prepared for any possible situation, I don't know what else it would be good for.

 

[lamedude]

F6 method for installing XP storage drivers but you can slipstream those.

Would love to play that game again.

Internet Archive got you covered.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

That's crazy that anyone would still have anything of even passing value stored on floppy disk. I have exactly ZERO bytes of data stored on either floppy or optical disk. I have manufacturers' optical software/driver disks, and a number of burned music CDs, and that's about it.

This thread has convinced me to recycle the last of the old floppy drives that I have stashed away in a box. The chances of ever needing to use one again in my lifetime are 1 in a million.

Not crazy -- just negligent. Truth is, there may not be anything worth saving in that old pile of floppies I've ignored too long.

 

[tcsenter]

I have 100s of 3.5-in floppies full of old archives and data. I just pulled a couple at random and they opened just fine - dated 1993!!!!

Get that data off to something else while you still can. I pulled the data off any remaining floppies years ago and put the data on DVD. I do still have a few floppy drives (internal and USB) just in case but that was my thinking 6 years ago. I'm beginning to wonder why I still have them.....

 

[OVerLoRDI]

F6 method for installing XP storage drivers but you can slipstream those.
Internet Archive got you covered.

Yes, this was the only reason I ever needed on in general, but Windows XP is so dead for fresh installs. If you are doing a fresh install of Windows XP today 99.9% of the time you can be certain that what you are doing is completely stupid.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Mostly if you need to retrieve info, as I don't think there's much reason to put stuff on a floppy.

Though if you are forced to give up data to a court or other law related org/person for some reason, nothing beats a 5 1/4" floppy. Make them work for it. :biggrin:

 

[cdebbie]

Certainly nowadays they're used to access old data that was stored in floppy disks or due to nostalgia (I've seen some cases like that), but mainly those are the two reasons why people could use these drives to access floppy disks currently.