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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

I miss the predictability of floppy disks. Assuming it was manufactured correctly, a floppy disk would always act like every other floppy disk. You could look at it and see everything there was to see. It didn't have firmware with mysterious origins and capabilities. If you bought a floppy disk from a reputable manufacturer and it failed, it was usually your own fault. Modern flash drives fail for inscrutable reasons, and that makes them more stressful to work with.

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Modern flash drives are at least an order of magnitude more reliable than floppy disks were. This is just rose-tinted nostalgia.

> Modern flash drives are at least an order of magnitude more reliable than floppy disks were.

I don't know if that is true. I have 5.25" floppies from ca.1990 that were readable as of just a couple years ago, so about 30 years.

You're saying flash drives are readable for at least 300 years? I don't know but I doubt that.

(The floppies might still be readable today, I just haven't tried. The content is now archived in a zfs pool.)

The flash drives give an interesting sense of reliability since the controller will keep freshening and error correcting. I havent dared to leave one unplugged for a few years with data I wanted.

No I mean short term reliability (like less than a decade).

I got so fed up with how unreliable floppy disks were in Middle School and High School, that I started using the 1999 equivalent of Dropbox. Before I left for school, I'd start an FTP upload of the document(s) I needed to my ISPs 20 MB free web space, it would finish and automatically disconnect from the 56k dialup, and then at school I'd download it on the school's 128K ISDN connection.

Maybe I've been exceptionally lucky, but I've never had a USB drive fail or act oddly. The only data-loss flash media failures I've had were microSD cards in Android phones, and an early SATA SSD.

i remember differently you buy 1.2 and accodentally stick in a 360 or was it vice versa… and things dint work right. Diff drives had diff head widths. Also apple vs commodore vs pc vs mac. Then there was dust and untecoverable read errors

I remember floppy disks failing, but mostly things like free AOL trial disks I repurposed by covering the write protect hole. I assume those were the cheapest they could find. The major brand name ones generally worked reliably.

I treated floppies fine and they were a constant pain. They give a nostalgic pang, but I'm very glad to see the back of them in actual use.

Floppy disks were anything but predictable.

My mom was at a public office where they would get data on floppy disks, and read issues were super common and reliability was really hit or miss, data corruption, sector errors, you name it.

Abort, Retry, Ignore?

"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk?"

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