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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022?

What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storage options.

They're definitely not something you'd want to keep around as archival media or anything but they served very well for the best part of 3 decades, and the main reason we moved on was because users started needing to store large images and video. I still rather like floppy disks.

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They are also tremendously slow, somewhat fragile, prone to media decay, and extremely difficult to source replacement media in 2021. Replacement drives are also somewhat hard to find.

Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.

> prone to media decay

Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.

... and I have had 3.5" floppies that have lost data by taking them for a five minute walk a block away.

40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.

I just recently went through around 300 floppy disks -- 3.5" HD mostly, but also some 5.25" 360k and a few 3.5" DD. All dating to 1985-1995.

Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted.

This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out.

The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?

I have many 3.5 inchers. None of them lost data, either.

Although as a precaution, I long ago copied them en masse to CDROMs. Later, the CDROMs got copied to hard disks.

I gave away my PDP-11 long ago, but not before I copied the 8" floppies it had (circa 1980). But one day I realized I had neglected to copy a critical file. I had the floppies, but no way to copy them. Then I remembered a friend of mine, Shal Farley, might still have an -11. Calling him up, sure enough, he had it but hadn't fired it up in years and was about to dispose of it. I mailed him the floppies.

He fired up the -11, it still worked fine, and the floppies all copied perfectly. My entire box of floppies, every byte.

A big thanks to Shal and his company, Cheshire Engineering.

(The missing file was one of the source files to Empire for the PDP-11, which I have now backed up on https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )

Thank you for sharing your source code for Empire!

My old floppies are great. The newer ones, starting around 2000 or so, are mostly junk.

I haven't bought a floppy since 2000, so I wouldn't know!

So have I. But I also remember plenty of floppies that I’ve written data to not even surviving the 30 minute cycle to college back in the 90s.

Maybe consumer floppies were of a lower quality than published ones? I don’t know if that’s true but I do remember having a really low success rate with consumer floppies (it got so bad I’d often write two floppies just in case).

I'd cut a notch in the floppies so I could turn them over and use them. The back sides worked fine, too!

I’d have still expected them be writable because unlike CDs, writing a magnetic field isn’t destructive. But what I meant was whether cheap blank disks used a slightly different (cheaper) magnetic alloy with a shorter read/write limit than commercial software where they maybe spent a little more knowing it needed to be read often?

I do remember cassettes had different quality magnetic strips but I don’t know if the same was ever true for disks too… so it’s probably bonkers. I’m just throwing some ideas around without much thought. :)

It might just be a case that college kid me was less careful with his disks than you were.

More recently though, I have unboxed my old collection of 3” (not 3.5” but literally 3 inch) floppies for the Amstrad CPC 464 and they almost all worked despite being nearly 40 years old. So I definitely believe you when you post about your success rate.

It depended on which brands of floppies you bought. Some vendors were more profit-oriented than others and would skimp on the binding agent or just the amount of magnetic material without which the signal can become so weak they could become corrupted by being the the same room as a Wooly Willy.

That was one of the earliest instances I remember, where superior functionality was shipped with a product but kind of locked up. And like some other such “locks” they were easily defeated.

I also remember plenty of floppies that I’ve written data to not even surviving the 30 minute cycle to college back in the 90s.

I think stray magnetic fields were more of a problem back then. Fridge magnets, magnetic clasps on wallets and bags, magnetic clasps on notebooks and binders, etc. There were lots of hidden opportunities for corruption.

These days, nobody worries about the mag stripe on their credit card getting wiped. But it was an active concern back then.

To be fair, basically nobody uses magstripe anymore.

Plenty still do. The Home Depots near me don't do chip. They're magstripe only.

I'm more annoyed when a store doesn't take Apple Pay. The clerks always seem embarrassed when I ask because I'm sure I'm the 900,000th person to inquire. I find it so odd that the Krogers in two cities I've been to recently don't do contactless payments at all.

They are also tremendously slow

When you're only reading 1.44 megs of data, speed isn't that big a deal.

It has been many years now, but I recall a full floppy dump took on the order of a few minutes to complete. Small data sizes were countered by the incredibly slow floppy drive interface.

They are decently easy to find in popular capacities at http://floppydisk.com

Speed. And, while they can be robust they are often not. One of the problems are misaligned drives. Where you will have robust use of them on one machine, and robust use on another machine. But if you take a disk written in one it can't be read in the other.

Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.

Back when I still used these I remembered they had horrible life span - I would take a new disk out from the box, wrote some files to it, then months later when I tried to read the disk I was unable to do so, with the disk drive making constant cricket sound.

> Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.

I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive.

In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.

I constantly had failed floppies.

I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers)

Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common

There was definitely a period, at least with 5.25" disks, when name brand disks like Verbatim definitely tended to be more reliable than cheap disks bought in bulk. The latter weren't that bad (usually) and it often still made sense to use them so long as you were extra-careful with backups.

In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.

They are not reliable at all.

And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.

I found it depends upon the make. The windows 95 floppy are good. Only linux in CD-ROM at that time. Both work ok.

USB sticks are better in every respect.

USB sticks also require an open USB port which can be used for all kinds of attack vectors that you just don't have to remember hardening against with a floppy.

Except security. Floppies can't do anything other than storage, but USB devices can be just about anything.

The story doesn't say much about what kind of computers are used, but the floppy drives could just as well be USB ones...

I never had a floppy fake an HID.

Extreme unreliability, terrible speed, tiny storage, dearth of available equipment. The reasons not to use floppy disks for anything that matters are numerous and clear.

> [...] and you can design your own format if you want to.

Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!?

This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade.

It happens though, there was a story some years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527

> This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades.

It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.

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