I like the USB aspect of this drive. However, where is my Zip drive? I have obsolete formats that I need to read!

and those 3.5er's aren't even floppy at all.

Load "*", 8

I've had that for years now in my desktop...

Damn - someone beat me to the Zip Drive reference.

@tucker: Speaking of Commodore, and being used to the 5.25 floppies that were floppy, when I first saw a 3.5" disk, I thought it was one of those hard disks people were talking about.

slow news day?

I still have a couple of floppies in the archive.
The data is backed up elsewhere of course, but it's come in handy to have a few blanks around when an old machine crops up.

damm floppies just won't DIE!!

it's like cockroaches!!!!!

@icepick314:

Seriously... It's not like any of the floppies around still actually work. Those things corrupt faster than The View.

"The future is gonna cost more money" hahaha

Let's start a memory card format war! SD FTW!

I've had one of these in my desktop beast (3 year old build) for it's entire life. Although, as I recall, it requires the standard Floppy cable for the floppy drive to work, and the memory card reader runs completely off the USB. This way, it's like having both in the same slot.

looks like the only difference is that mine is black...

btw, it's great to have this for me - i know a lot of people that are real old school. this lets me work with their data. like my dad, who still has over 50 floppy disks, with stuff like windows 3.1 and visual basic 2, and he doesn't want to get rid of it... or his old QBasic programs, or his old text files that I get to dig through every once in a while... :)

@kavendano14:

free CD boner in the second bay... no floppy drive. You wanna add a 3 and half floppy drive?

I suppose this is to encourage people to back up any leftover floppies to a more reliable format. Besides that, no idea.

@Flugenhiber:

I admit I've reigned from that era... I still remember loading Dungeon Master I and II, Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore, Betrayal at Krondor, Shadowlands, and all those great games from back when that came on tons of disks that were eventually mixed up.

Have had one for quite a few years. I actually used to keep floppies around for boot disks/memory testing. It was easier than wasting an entire CD on it when I only needed it once. And having all the memory card readers in the same bay is nice.

Would be interesting if it were usb only and you can boot off the usb floppy. Seriously, floppies are really only good for booting to do some low level stuff. Yes, you can boot off a flash drive but some apps don't support creating a boot image onto flash.

Hey now, besides my hair, clothing, and music choices I am not stuck in 1987. I still need a floppy to install Windows XP on an SATA drive.

Wow, reading back over that, I realize I'm stuck in 2001...

@Metkis: Humans or the original SimFarm, FTW!

@Geisrud: I did that with an Amiga.

I read all my floppy disks into images a few years ago. Burned the images onto a single cdrom (well, also some backups) and threw the floppies out. Great space savings, and of course I've never had to refer back to the floppy images.

@szrimaging:

Yeah man... loved SimFarm. Loved Amiga too.

Can you believe that my dad bitched me because I had no floppy on my computer?

I love finding old floppies - about a year ago i found a full set of the install disks for oh whats that game... where theres bats and a guy with a whip and you get potions.... Dark Castle! Ha! i knew id remember. that game rocked.

I like using floppies for security. I don't have to worry about the files I put on them. Besides the fact that almost no computers have floppy drives anymore, some people don't even know what they are. Best security ever.

@nutbastard:

That game was pretty tough(cool) man!

I'm trying to remember this one game where you played a vampire... you could change into a bat and such. I can't remember it though.

wow this is like the 8-track, lithograph, cassette , mini cd, player..... By the way i still have plenty ion stock. only 999.99. CALL NOW!!! 555-555-DEER!!!

I still find it amazing how long the 3.5" format lasted in computers. First time I saw a 3.5" drive was a friends Amiga 1200 or something. What a sweet computer that was.

@EdgesRazor: and for those of us with SCSI RAID drives in our workstations, it's a heck of alot easier to load those stupid 3rd party drivers at the F6 screen on XP re-install, when it's on floppy...

what's a floppy disk?

speaking of zip drives, I interviewed w/ a law firm that prided itself on its technological prowess, yet on their site they mentioned how they use zip drives to transport data and burnable CDROMs as well as when the data is too large they can access it through dial-up access.

I was surprised when the partner i interviewed w/ didn't whip out his beeper and try and make a call on a rotary phone.

@Metkis:

Okay... I remembered... it was just called Dracula.

@Metkis: Couldn't you do that in the Castlevania games on the NES?

@SZRIMAGING

Not with a floppy, you can't!

I actually have been meaning to get one these for awhile since I have Smart, SD, and MemoryStick cards hanging around and no reader at all!

Eh, 3.5" floppies are more early 90s, the 80s was the 5.25" floppies.

Actually, I used to work for a military contractor that kept sensitive data onsite on 3.5 floppies. They figured if anyone stole the safe, they'd be hard pressed to find a PC with a 3.5" reader.

@Metkis:
back when game names were simple, like "Adventure Guy" or "Hockey"...

@Elvisisdead: rephrase 5.25" floppies. Elephant brand, if I recall.

Make one that can read Syquest and Bernoulli's along with those Elephant (DSDD) floppies and I'll take two!

@nutbastard:

Makes 'em really tough to be sure you remembered the right name. For some reason, the RPGs had the coolest names though.

In '87 weren't we all still using 5.25" drives (except Apple and Amiga)?

My dad has one of these installed in his custom PC. Not bad, really. His older work files are still on floppies, so backwards compatibility is a plus.

More new PCs are coming with card readers, though, so it's mainly custom PCs and older machines that would benefit.

Need Zip Drives!

YES you need floppy's still, try to install a RAID on XP without one.

Haha, Bram Stokers Dracula? That game was awesome. Gotta find me some holy wafers. But yeah, my mom still uses floppies. Despite my constant nagging her to get a flash stick because Floppies are far to volatile to be saving important documents on. My dad has had a flash stick for years now, I'm rather proud of my dad. He went from the man who asks where the any key is to being moderately tech savvy, I mean I don't think he could install windows, but he's not bad.

I remember 5.25" back in grade school. Oregon trail was where it was at (caulk the wheels on the wagon, spend as much time as you could hunting)

ah, the good ole' days

You still need a floppy to install XP on a SATA drive, last I checked. It may be an outdated tool, but it's definitely better to have one than not. I think this is a lot better than all those stupid card readers that cram 128 types of card reader into one thing, even though you're only like five that you can expect to run into.

@nintendude: i still have a stack of Iomega JAZZ disks to read.... anybody want to give me a JAZZ unit? haha

@discounteggroll:

Holy yeah!

"Ron died from dysentery."
"Peenis died from dysentery."
"Abraham Lincoln died from dysentery."
"Kit Eaton died from dysentery."

@eckre: Worked just fine for me....

@eckre:

Well shit, that's no ones fault but Microsoft's. If you can't boot off of a CD or DVD to do an install, well, that's just bass-ackwards.

@dancinbojangles:

Huh? I've been installing XP onto systems with SATA drives booting off the install CD for YEARS. How old is your motherboard?