Another crazy idea, floppies this time

[Joe Auman]

I have been tossing this up in my head for seveal days now, and I needed to see if this could even be done in the slightless of sence. So, I thought this was the best place to ask.

1.44Mb floppy drives have been in our computers for awhile, sharing the lime light with the "stone age" 5 and a half inch floppies and newer CD-ROMS.

OK, question number one. Why are we still using the older 1.44 Mb floppy drives? Read/write speeds of the floppies are horrid, not to mention the seek times. Ok, so the BIOS uses them as the first start-up drive. But there has to be more than that (besides the cheap media).
Question number two. Could it be possible to create a backwards compatible drive for larger compacities floppies? A little unclear, but lets see if I can clear it up. Lets call this new floppy drive the Recall drive. Take a standard 1.44Mb floppy. If formatted in the Recall drive, it can reach capacities of 50Mb. This disk than can be used by any Recall drive. But, we have a old 1.44Mb floppy we wish to keep at 1.44Mb. No problem, the Recall drive can read/write to the floppy with better read/write/seek times. Getting the picture yet? I know this is horribly unclear. Basicly it's just a new floppy drive that formats floppy for more capacity and can still read the old floppies.
Question number 3. If the Recall drive is possible, can the arangement of the cylinders/sectors of the 1.44Mb floppies be changed by formatting? I understand the difference between Zip disks and floppy disks, the arrangement of the cylinders are different and the write/read head is smaller in the Zip drive. The rearangement of the cyliders would allow for the incresed compacities.

Well, anyways, I guess I'm just tired of spanning the old floppies for backup/transfering. Any ideas about a new floppy drive?

[reboot]

Ever heard of the LS120?
Just kidding.
I've been using 2.88MB floppys for quite awhile.
You need to find good drives that will format that tight, and a good formatting program. Windows won't do it.
Not exactly what you are talking about, but I think it's a good idea.

[jessho]

The problem with floppy drives, from what I understand, is the heads have to be placed high enough above the disk to prevent head crashes due to dust and the disk itself since it is semi-rigid and will travel enough to cause a head crash. Due to this, the heads read and write data to a large area.

Hard disks have small heads which read and write data to multiple rigid disks which enables more data in a device that will fit into the drive bay of a computer.

The ultimate drive, to me, to replace the floppy would have a buss that would detect what kind of disk was in it. There would also be a buss to power a small, thin hard disk that would have around 50MB of storage. The drive would disable the standard floppy hardware when the other type of disk was used.

[jessho]

Another thought.

I know that the type of chip that is used for CMOS chips is, at this time, expensive to make, which is why the RAM in PC's does not have this for memory. If chip technology reached the point that memory of this type was affordable, wouldn't the best portable storage device be one that had this type of memory in it with a small onboard battery?

[glc]

Just get an LS120 or a Sony HiFD - I'm *not* kidding!

[robo555]

Most new motherboard supports bootable CDs...700MB.

[Toaster]

The floppy has been around for ever it seems. With todays systems surpassing the 1GHZ barrier, we still use the lowly floppy. The LS-120 is an option as is the 2.88 floppy.
The 2.88 floppy is rather picky on media. When the drive was designed, it required special media and this stuff wasn`t cheap. Unfotunately, the 2.88 died because of lack of "general" support especially drives.
Next up is the zip. While the zip drive is a good all around idea, something in the marketplace just didn`t let it catch on and go. This was the "copyrights" that IOMEGA imposed.
Would these copyrights be relaxed the drive would flourish more then it has. The old 1.2MB 5 1/4 is actually a better drive but its size was its downfall.

[lynchmob]

Let's hear from the ignorant-I'll be thier representitive!
Joe,as to question 2: for the backwards compatible feature you speak of, would having a buffer for the drive to write to accomplish what you suggest?The drive would read the 1.44 fd and send the data to a buffer that would give a faster read time.Or perhaps I'm missing somthing because the holes in my logic are so large that I'm standing in one of them? I hear you can buy 50MB mini cd-r disks that work in any cd-r or cd-rw.
lynch

[glc]

The main advantage to the LS-120 and the HiFD is the backwards compatibility - you can use their cartridges for full capacity (120mb for the LS-120 and 200mb for the HiFD) or standard 1.44 floppies.

[G3]

1.44 disks..there are some reasons why it is still around. One is universal compatibility. Everysystem today is sold with a floppy drive. It might not come with a cd rom (even though that is pushing it) but you never know..

Another thing is boot-up disks. Yes, most motherboards can now boot-up from Cd's now (which I read above) BUT most cannot. Only current ones can. So what if a person goes out and buy 100 dollar softare and can't load it cause they didn't include a floppy bootup disk.

And yes, you can say, well why don't they include both a CD and floppy. Well which is cheaper for them? Buying multi-thousand dollar CDRW writers (for production usage) OR buying a simple cheap 15 dollar floppy drive (which everyone has!).

Transfering files is another reason. The ease of it, to just drag a 10 KB .txt file over to the floppy is so much easier then opening up your CDRW software, checking cd for errors, initializing the cd, writing the cd, checking the cd again for errors, and then never being able to use that cd again (unless rw) just for a 10 KB .txt file! ? ! No thanks :)

So you might think that floppy's are usless, but they still have a long excistance in our systems. And Mac's made a huge mistake taking them out....Jobs is going too much on design and not enough on functionality. :(

[waiting]

LS-120's work