Drives of old.

[Hornet3d]

I answered a posting related to the old 'A' drive over in the Hivewire3D is closing thread but it is detracting from that thread so stated this


The old 'A' drive or 3.5" floppy disks are pretty well extinct but I did see recently that one company has developed a USB portable version -

'Are you looking to read or write data using legacy 3.5" Floppy Disks (FD) for your applications such as archiving or historical data mining? Current Computer Systems are now being manufactured without these once popular peripherals.

Introducing the new Dynamode USB-FDD. Compact and stylish, the device is fully USB Bus Powered and allows users to read and write to standard 3.5" Floppy Disks to a formatted capacity of 1.44Mbytes - the industry standard. With fast read and write times and the ability to be used with a variety of Operating Systems including Windows® and MAC® OS X. Fully USB1.1 compatible and yielding a high data transfer rate of up to 250k bits per second, the USB-FDD is ideal for both Desktop, Servers and Mobile users.'

While new computers do not come equipped with such devices isn't strange that the OS drive is still always the 'C' drive and no drive is shown with the letter 'A'.

 

[DanaTA]

My first PC was an IBM compatible XT, with a 20MB hard drive! A friend promptly upgraded it to a 40MB drive, and replaced the plain graphics card with a Hercules card that gave very good graphics resolution, though it was still monochrome. I remember DOS fitting on a 5.25" floppy disk! At the time, my wife's Commodore 64 had color graphics and sound, and a system called GEOS that gave a Mac-like graphical operating system complete with various fonts and mouse use! No hard drive at all! In fact, when I first bought it for her, it came with a tape drive. Yes, cassette tapes! Took a while for any program to load. We soon replaced that with a 5.25" floppy drive.

Dana

 

[robert952]

I have a USB 3.5" drive. I think I transferred the data from them. But I am hanging on to the drive and a few disks. May be a need for a 'sneaker net' in the future and the old technology will be a good alternative.

 

[eclark1894]

I used to have trays of 1.44 Mb disks. In eaarlier times on my Mac, I used to have to swap discs until they finally invented Virtual RAM. and this was all before I had ever been on a modem, which, if I remember was only about 14k baud.

 

[Stezza]

 

[Miss B]

Oh do I remember THOSE days.

 

[eclark1894]

Hey, someone made a video of me logging on to Compuserve!

 

[Doug Hunter]

Ah, the good old days.

My first computer had twin 5.25” floppies. None of those old 12” floppies for me!
It ran on a CPM operating system. None of that buggy PC-DOS or MS-DOS stuff.
With software it cost $12,000. Which at the time was as much as my family car!

Best part of those good old days was that my university degree was free. Because that’s what going to university was like in Australia. Not only that but all other expenses (travel, accommodation, meals, books, software etc.) for university were fully tax deductible. I’m sure those in the USA can relate
Now I just have a degree in ancient computer technology

 

[robert952]

I think I have established by strange sense of humor. So, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
I took a 3.5 disk and used a large magnet to put it on the side of a metal file cabinet.
I labeled the disk: 'Emergency Backup Disk'.

 

[carmen indorato]

Alisa, I believe it is important people backup their purchases on reliable media, for once the store is gone, if they loose everything, it's gone for good. People only think about these things when it's already too late. I have just recently lost my main backup drive, and I never thought that could happen because it was from a known, respected brand. Only later I found out that these "green labels" meant they are not reliable. At Amazon and Newegg, we have reports of as much as 1 in every 4 of these drives dying the same day, or worse, a year later, when people had time to backup plenty of data on it. If only I knew those things, I could had prevented massive data losses, like my entire online purchase history - years of data meticulously organized, not to mention items from stores that no longer exist.

The HW store is closing and people have to backup a lot of things. I don't want what happened to me to happen to them, just because I didn't know what these label colors meant. If we move these info elsewhere, people may not see it, and it has everything to do with the store closing.

Used to be "in the olden days" reliable drive manufacturers like Seagate, WD and a few others i no longer remember with what the time was called a M.T.B.F. rating giving consumer some idea of how much time they could expect from their purchases before it would die. Thes numbers/ratings were based on "supposedly" rigorous testing on all their drives. I generally had good luck with Seagate and another big drive manufacturer (sorry my memory fails) which was almost the only drive I would buy back then because of the company's stellar ratings.
What happened to those days? Green Blue Yellow Black? Sheitz! Don't manufacturers take their work and products seriously any more? What ever happened to professional manufacturer pride and accountability. Granted they NEVER guaranteed their products or offered any compensation for data loss but at least they would replace a drive if it failed in that warranty period. DO they at least do that anymore?

As far as loss I have lost MORE WORK DOING BACK UPS FROM DRIVE TO DISC OR DRIVE TO DRIVE than any other time. I am no longer able to consider backing up viable stuff. Like someone told me once this is a lossy technology and all drives fail a matter of when.

With regards to my art work, I curse the day I ever got involved with digital tech. I have art work and photos done in analog format from when I was in 5th grade. Yet since entering digital over the past 25 plus yeaars i have lost almost every single important piece of work due to power outages and surges, drive failures, Mother board failures, CD and DVD technologies likes of 100 year plus durability. And then there is the hugely painfully disappointing failures due to lack of use where a drive, disc or computer sits around unused for a while (no matter of conditions stored idle under). I thought not using it would keep the archives on the drive longer but I found that to be as false as hoping the data would last for the promised 100 years on CD/DVD technology which have also dismally failed me.
All drives and tech are meant to fail and all data is meant to be lost...eventually. PERIOD!!!
Once I got that accepted in my heart I no longer fear losing stuff any more and move on. Everything in life is ephemeral and gets left behind when we leave this plane.

Despite that biyt of pain buffering insight,,,,,,has anyone here worked with M-DISC technology? LOL

 

[KageRyu]

yes, but is there a USB alternative to this: