Floppy drives...

Do any of you still have a floppy drive installed in your main PC/computer?

Until recently I was still including a floppy drive in my systems because the motherboards still have the ports and I had spare drives, so I thought I might as well. But then I tried to think when I actually ever used the drive and within the last 2 years and I think it must have been about 4 times. Other than that it has just sat there, and as the connectors are still the horrible old ribbon type and a floppy power connector is needed I decided to get rid of it from my main system and disable the port in the BIOS.

So my main PC is now completely rid of any old ribbon cables or molex connectors. As it has a modular PSU all the cables it now needs installed (in addition to the 24 pin motherboard and 8 pin PSU cables) are 2 SATA cables and a PCI-E cable. It looks so neat and tidy in there! :)

I am however not abandoning floppy drives completely. In my emulation PC I've left one installed as it is useful for transferring downloaded Amiga files, or converting Atari ST disk images back to disk. But other than for retro stuff I don't see me using floppy disks again. I think for current use the floppy drive and disk is dead.

I still have a floppy drive on one of my PC's - my media box in the front room - not on my main machine anymore as it's now legacy free like yours.

They still can be useful - updating bios on cards, memtest utilities, disk eraser programs. Rather than messing around burning an ISO file or preparing a bootable USB drive, floppy's are just easy. Plus kind of nostalgic hearing them whirl away.

An Amiga without a floppy wouldn't be an Amiga of course! But yes, in general, they are pretty much redundant. I think Sony have officially stopped producing floppy disks now haven't they?

I only use one in the PC with my Catweasel, but that one wasn't switched on since over 2 years now. In my other PCs I don't use them at all anymore, why should I?

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Originally Posted by Bloodwych

They still can be useful - updating bios on cards, memtest utilities, disk eraser programs. Rather than messing around burning an ISO file or preparing a bootable USB drive..

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Although a lot of current motherboards support direct USB drive access from the BIOS for bios updating. And with a HiRens CD it contains memtest and disk eraser tools as standard so no need for anything else. Just keep the one disc handy, or create a booting HiRens boot USB drive.

I have one :). But I only used it a few times since I built the machine. It wasn't plugged in properly at first, so it didn't work when I first tried to use it, but I wasn't desperate so didn't bother to do anything. But it is plugged in properly now and I have used it a few times.