Talk:Floppy disk/Archive 4

Obsolete
In my opinion, floppy disk are in fact obsolete. Is just that they don't meet ALL the types of obsolescence. Remember, just because a minority of people use it, doesn't mean it is not obsolete technology. Some people may use them for nostalgia reasons, or simply because it just works. There are lots of items in use in the world today which are in fact obsolete. By looking at the obsolete article I would describe the floppy disk as having "Technical obsolescence". Josestefan (talk) 17:17, 25 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Your opinion is fine, but the article needs to be based on sources. Here is one that in 2004 calls the 3 1/2" formats "current" and older ones "obsolete". Dicklyon (talk) 18:04, 25 December 2008 (UTC)


 * It might be a workable compromise to refer to the format as a whole as obsolescent, meaning that it is becoming obsolete. S HEFFIELD S TEEL TALK 13:17, 19 March 2009 (UTC).


 * I don't disagree with what you said, but the word obsolete/obsolescent is something of a WP:PEACOCK -- if we competently describe the disk and how it compares to newer technologies (which I think the article does do), the reader should be able to form a judgment for themselves, without us making that determination for them. It's really not our job to rate the usefulness of the subject. Ham Pastrami (talk) 01:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

More on 8" disks
I wish there was more info on 8" floppies and their formats. Especially in Radio Shack and other rare computer systems. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.170.52.157 (talk) 00:42, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

errors + floppies
3" disks 'One example is the rectangular-shaped plastic casing, almost taller than a 3½-inch disk,' = 4" so = taller than 3½" disk. 'more than twice as thick, almost the size of a standard compact audio cassette.' = 2:3 the thickness of main body of a standard compact audio cassette (= length & 5:4 width).


 * Huh? 193.63.174.11 (talk) 19:08, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Windows used 7 floppies before Windows'95
 * True... I think for 3.11 anyway. 6 main disks plus networking extras or something. Didn't really take all that long. It doesn't take THAT much time to read the entire contents of a single DSHD in one go. Don't forget there were the 3 or 4 MSDOS disks to get through first, however! 193.63.174.11 (talk) 19:08, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

'Standard 3½" disk' has 'HD' on it.
 * Standard HIGH DENSITY disks do. Standard Double-density ones do not. 193.63.174.11 (talk) 19:08, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Why = not Atari ST format included: 720K = PC (80 tracks of 9 sectors) but magazines gave 82 tracks of 10 sectors. Some programs came on 11 sectored disks using interlacing.


 * Because none of those were standard, they were ALL custom formats, and you can do that on any machine with suitable access to the hardware (you can get PC formatters that will wring almost the full 2mb out of a disk - whether or not its a good idea - and also skew-format them to be 3 or 4 times faster, similar to Microsoft's Win9x / Office 4 install floppies). If you inserted a freshly unwrapped, unformatted DSDD at the GEM desktop, single clicked the A: icon, went to the File > Format... menu item, and let it run a double sided format (oh so slow! but more reliable than the fast formatters) you'd get out a bog standard, damn-near-MSDOS compatible (or with the later TOS versions, absolutely MSDOS compatible), 80-track, 9-sector, 720KB (712.5KB usable) disk. The custom formats, particularly the common and reliable 80tr 10sec (or 81/82tr 10sec, with the 81st/82nd track used by games for saving hi-scores or other less crucial information) sure were useful, but there was never any kind of agreed standard for it. You just did whatever you thought - or discovered by testing - your media was capable of. Floppies are, after all, not much more than flattened audio tapes, with the inherent variability that comes with. It's similar to overburning CDRs and DVDRs. The industry standard is what's stamped on the label or encoded in the TOC (650mb/74 min, 700mb/80 min, 4483/4888mb aka 4.37Gb). Anything more that you can drag out of it, or are allowed without trickery on 74 minute blanks, is entirely up to the manufacturer, the media quality, how good your drive is, and even what speed you run at. And that extra bit is the area which succumbs to CDR/DVDR-fade earliest. Hence there's no standard or notability in an 80'57" CDR, just as there isn't in an 81-track floppy. 193.63.174.11 (talk) 19:08, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Act Sirus used multi-speed drives to get 600K on a 5¼" floppy. That = as much on 1 side using DD disk as an HD 1M2 has. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.217.180.237 (talk) 20:52, 25 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Quite neat, though how common was it? Because I know of Apple and Commodore's vari-speed 3.5" 800kb drives, but not this... 193.63.174.11 (talk) 19:08, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Datapoint's Significance To 8-inch FDD Production
Ken Whitehead based upon personal experience claims that Datapoint Corporation was "one of the largest manufacturers of 8-inch FDDs." This is Original Research, unattributed and incorrect. Published Disk/Trend Reports analyzing the FDD industry shows that Datapoint ceased production in 1982 and that from 1979-1982 Datapoint's FDD revenue was $41 million. This was far less than the OEM revenue of Shugart Associates ($801 M) and the revenues of captive manufactures such as IBM ($1341M), Tandy ($350M), Tandon ($245M) and DEC ($198M). The numbers in units would be even worse to Datapoint, since the captive revenues are stated at the higher prices charged by the captive manufacturer's parent to its end users. Either way, revenue or units, Datapoint is so small as to IMO be to much information and therefore should be stricken from this article. Even if we added a footnote, where it should be, that is, in the main article, History_of_the_floppy_disk, properly researched, Datapoint is likely to be rounding error.Tom94022 (talk) 18:20, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

The other floppy sizes
This article mentions only the three common floppy sizes but there were at least four others.

In the first generation, the sizes were 9" and 8". In the second generation the sizes were 5 3/4" (sometimes called 6") and 5 1/4". In the third generation they were 3 3/4" and 3 1/2".  In all three cases the slightly smaller format won the popularity war.  The very first Apple Lisa used the 3 3/4" format, and the documentation for the later Lisa made note of this. There was also a smaller floppy which was about 2.2", which I saw used by a music keyboard. Randall Bart    Talk   22:55, 25 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually don't you admit there were only three common floppy sizes when you say that in "all three cases the slightly smaller format won the popularity war."? BTW, it wasn't always the slightly smaller size that won, although indeed in each generation there was a winner.
 * I never heard of a 9-inch FD, can you name the vendor(s) and time frame? If you are thinking of the Burrough's FD I believe it was well after the 8-inch.  There were 3 different FD vendors before IBM made the ""Type 1" 8-inch FD public in 1973, but everyone immediately jumped on the IBM standard.
 * I never heard of a 5¾-inch FD, can you name the vendor(s) and time frame?
 * There were many more than two attempts to set the standard for the third generation FDs and most are described in the article or in the History of the Floppy Disk Article. In the end the MIC 3½-inch design based upon the Sony design and ultimately standardized by ANSI became common and all the others faded into oblivion.
 * There were several attempts to establish a fourth generation FD but none really gained the market presence of the previous three generations so again were never common. The most notable attempts were the Sony MD Data and the Iomega ZIP drive.  The latter got fairly high volume but with the media priced at $10/disk it never became common - remember getting yr 3½-inch diskettes free in the mail from AOL :-).
 * I would not change the article; if u want to add more detail about the minor formats, the place is the History of the Floppy Disk Article.Tom94022 (talk) 04:01, 26 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The zip drives were quite common in the 1995-1999 timeframe, depending on your definition of “common”. They were common in the sense your average geek would have a zip drive, but not common in the sense that, when you bought a computer, it was a given it would have a zip drive.  Zip drives were successful because you didn’t need a special connector to use them; you could attach it to the parallel port almost all PCs had in that time frame (or the SCSI Zip drive if you had a Macintosh or, in my case, used Linux before the Paraport driver was made).  They were used a lot until compact disc recordables got affordable (hit the $1 per blank disk price point) around 1999 or 2000.  There were competitors, such as the SyQuest EZ 135 Drive, the LS-120, and higher priced higher capacity options like the Jaz drive, the Orb Drive, the SparQ drive, among others. Samboy (talk) 14:18, 15 October 2009 (UTC)


 * The Zips (and Jazz's) did also have a minor heyday with their internally fitted, ATAPI- and SCSI-interfaced versions, and they did a fine job of bridging the gap we didn't even know was there between floppies and 64+ mb USB memory sticks which CDRWs were just too cumbersome, slow and fragile to really satisfy. Though not standard fit, it was an option on various new machines for a while, and almost every desktop at my university (early 2000s - so there were some Zip250s as well as 1990s-spec Zip100s) sported one (even the rare ones with CD writers), so much so that I bought one to put in my own PC. I had a CD writer, I had access to a parallel Zip if I wanted it, but slotting a faster, driverless, permanently available, neatly contained one in above the floppy just made a lot more sense. It wasn't all that geeky - enough "normal" people used them in much the same way a netbook owner may have an external high-capacity HDD or DVD burner nowadays. 100Mb per £8 cartridge was a perfectly good amount of fast, rewritable storage at the time, when a flaky single-use 650Mb CDR was a pound and single- or 2-speed CDRWs (requiring special software) about £10... 193.63.174.11 (talk) 19:19, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

2.88
2.88 MB floppies are compatible with 2.88MB drives that were found in some IBM PS/2 models, also the NeXT CUBE, and the NeXTstation by Apple, and several models of the IBM ThinkPad. These diskettes are also used in some NCR, some Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and some Toshiba machines, as well as Cisco equipment. Also used with the CMD FD-4000 floppy drive for Commodore 64/128 computers. 83.30.127.152 (talk) 14:04, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Formatted, unformatted
Floppies had 2.0 megs of unformatted capacity (and yes, I used those DOS programs from Simtel to increase my floppy capacity from 1.44 up to about 1.7 megs back in the day until I got a hard disk); once the disk was formatted in the “normal” manner, the capacity was 1.4/1.44/1.47 megs. The capacity decreased once we put the filesystem on the floppy, but “formatted capacity” was the number of bytes available before putting the filesystem on the disk. Samboy (talk) 12:41, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Over-formatting floppies after using a strong magnet on them
Would using a strong magnet (like out of a old hard disk drive) be able to erase all data from the disk and enable it to be formatted to 2 MB without disk errors? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.226.108.98 (talk) 04:11, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Not really. The unformatted capacity does not include things like the required gaps between sectors, and the headers and trailers on the sectors (the header typically contains ID information, the trailer a CRC, etc.). Those *need* to be on the disk, but don't count towards the formatted capacity. Many floppy controllers supported different sector sizes, and you might well have been able to format a 3.5" floppy with 1KB sectors, and get more than the "normal" 1.44MB because there's less per-sector overhead. In the old days, 8" floppies were often formatted with sizes sector sizes between 128 and 1024 byte, the latter having considerably less overhead (and more formatted capacity). Alternatively, if the controller is up to it, you can reduce (somewhat) the length of the inter- sectors gap and squeeze in some more sectors on each track (MS did just that with the 1.68MB – 21 sector per track - format they often used to distribute software - and while standard PC diskette controllers could read that, they could not write that format). Theoretically a sector the size of the entire track (about 12.5KB) would provide the almost the full unformatted capacity, but no standard floppy controller would handle that. Rwessel (talk) 06:12, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Image request: internals
The article is great and has so many wonderful images. Complements to everyone who has done this. I think a useful image would be the inside of a floppy (esp. 5 1/4), because I don't know if most people now have seen the magnetic disc inside these days (or the rest of the internals. Thanks!  -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 17:20, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Advantage over ROMS?
Can someone add an explanation why many systems used floppy disks instead of ROMs? ROM cartridges where smaller (see PC-Engine), despite their name you could save changes on it too and games on ROMs where as expensive as ones on floppy disks. So what was the advantage of disks? 85.4.245.65 (talk) 10:28, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Please add new material to the end of the discussion.
 * Depending upon the era, it is was some combination of recordability, capacity, price and/or inertia that accounted for the demand for FDs vs ROMS. Tom94022 (talk) 00:30, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Past Tense
Should this article be recast in the past tense? Does anyone still use floppy disks? They haven't been sold at my nearest Costco for over 5 years. Yopienso (talk) 23:26, 15 March 2010 (UTC)


 * They still exist in many older applications, although that's certainly continuing to fade. I even have some hardware in our computer room that uses 5.25" floppies to boot – and it’s on a current maintenance contract from IBM.  There’s certainly no new applications for floppies (well, at least not any major applications - all sorts of odd things happen in niches), since you can put an Ethernet port, USB port, or memory card slot on a device along with a few hundred MB of flash for less than the cost of a floppy drive.


 * But 3.5" floppy drives (particularly in external USB form) and media are readily available, although perhaps not at Costco stores (although they do sell 3.5” media on their online site). Rwessel (talk) 20:27, 22 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I lost a lot of data stored on floppies because I don't have a computer either at home or at work that can read them.  :(  Oh, not a "lot," but some stuff I wanted.  3.5 disks aren't available at any office supply in Anchorage, Alaska--that's the extent of my knowledge and searching!  :)  Have a happy day, Yopienso (talk) 22:57, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

All content that implies date or era or synchronous events is problematic, necessitating update(s) at a later time. I cite an instance in Floppy Disk:This made the disk look more like a greatly oversized present day .... "Present day" is an undesirable characterization, since it is so imprecise. I think the sentence needs to be fixed, but, being new, don't know how. By the way, I made an edit for content a few paragraphs earlier in the same article, which I also signed on the edit page. JonathanESteele (talk) 23:50, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

New “floppies and music” text should probably be deleted as spam
I've gone to the talk page since this has revered back and forth several times now.

I'm proposing just removing the entire section (again). This appears to be an effort at self promotion, and a violation of WP:SOAP and/or WP:LINKSPAM. The email contact listed on the linked site's contact page, http://www.disketteetikette.tk/contact.html, is n***.j*******84@****.com, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the editor's handle of "nsj84".

Plausibly the discogs link could stay with a short bit of text, but it's not at all clear to me that there has been any meaningful usage of floppies to distribute music in a decade. Perhaps rewording the line to "In the past, floppy disks were occasionally used as a medium for distributing music." Rwessel (talk) 19:44, 1 April 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree that the sentence is likely spam and should be removed. I already dropped the Disketteetikette site to a footnote since it is not selling anything.  Subsequently, I was unable to find any recently released music available on FDs at Discogs (I did find some downloads for sale at less than 1440 KiB which could be loaded onto an FD, but no music on physical FD media for sale).  Finally, I really can't ever recall any serious music sales on FDs.  If someone can find reliable sources for significant historical or current sales of music on FDs then the sentence should stay, but with reliable sources.  Otherwise, I suggest we remove it.  Tom94022 (talk) 16:47, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Floppy pictures
Could we get some decent photographs of floppy disks? Something nice like the one at this site would be nice. The current photographs are so jaded, and the picture so faded that it looks like a floppy from the remnants of the computer age following world war 3.Smallman12q (talk) 21:41, 14 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Not only are they poor quality, but they are redundant to the photo at the beginning of the article; how about just deleting them? Tom94022 (talk) 19:08, 17 April 2010 (UTC)


 * They were added by an anonymous user here; I'm going to revert to the originals. Tom94022 (talk) 19:16, 17 April 2010 (UTC)


 * I say leave them - the comparison photo is good as a comparison, but the detailed photos are useful too. Rwessel (talk) 19:17, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

I thought the non-floppy ones were called Stiffies.
I was amazed not to find the term "stiffy" on this page, so I went looking for book sources. Imagine my surprise to find out that (except for a National Geographic article), all of the references were from South African sources, and in fact a dictionary of slang and unconventional English listed it as a specifically South African term:  Live and learn. --Slashme (talk) 16:22, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I added Stiffies as a footnote in the article. I think the term may also have been used in Australia - a British thing perhaps :-) Tom94022 (talk) 17:00, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Sector:Shift
I've removed the following from the Ultimate Capacity and Speed section:

The sector:shift parameter controls the order in which sectors are located on each track of the disk. Naively, one could place the sectors consecutively - 1, 2, 3, 4,... - but when multiple sectors are being read or written, this requires the disk controller and the CPU to handle the data from each sector, or prepare the data for the next sector, in the very short time that it takes the disk to rotate from the end of one sector to the beginning of the next. For example, when reading, if sector 2 reaches the drive heads before processing of the data from sector 1 has been completed, it is too late, and the disk must rotate one full revolution before sector 2 can be handled, resulting in a catastrophic loss of overall throughput. If the sectors are placed so that consecutively numbered sectors are further apart - for example, 1, 9, 2, 10, 3, 11,... - then a much longer time is available for processing the data from sector 1 before sector 2 arrives and needs to be processed.

This is incorrect. It describes interleave, not sector shifting, which is something completely different. To integrate it back into the article, there should be added a description of actual sector shifting, and this renamed to Interleave as it should be. I'll do it later because of time constraints, and if someone is willing to do it before I'm done, go for it :) Also, if there are some objections to my comment in the meantime... :Arny (talk) 15:56, 28 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree with your pulling this material, not only because it is incorrect (as u point out) but because IMO we really need to fix section 7, which appears to be quite a mess. Sub sections Efficiency of disk space usage(7.1)  and Ultimate capacity and speed(7.10) are generic descriptions of formatting alternatives while the rest are examples of one or more of the several generic formatting alternatives or irrelevant to formatting (e.g., Auto loaders).  Perhaps the formatting material should all be moved to Floppy disk format.  In any event, I suggest you look at the whole picture while fixing this one misteak :-)  Tom94022 (talk) 16:55, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Emulators
Generally, Wikipedia is not a directory. A list of suppliers and manufacturers is not usually part of article content. This type of list often attracts spammers. The lists are always sleective, giving the impression that editors endorse particular products. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:26, 9 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Also we don't permit external links within the text of an article, they should go in the external links section - and a list of emulators would fail WP:EL. --Cameron Scott (talk) 15:34, 9 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Since revision 11:51, 28 December 2008 you can find a reference to "jimwarholic.com/.../fdd-floppy-disk-drive-emulators.php", an article about "The Floppy Disk Drive Engineering Design Challenge SSD to FDD". I can't simply understand why this source has to be suddelny deleted. It has considered as a Reliable-Source from 2008 to 2010 and its updated version (2 years have gone by) is also available. Deleting sources and infos from articles is a serious matter. People that want to get rid of this good article should give a better explanation and find at least a good substitute. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.48.34.65 (talk)


 * The reference appears to be a non-sequitor and should be deleted for that reason also. You have three editors now wanting it deleted, i think that's enuf; particularly since the one editor wanting it is an IP address.  Tom94022 (talk) 04:25, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

It's not a reliable source, that's all the explanation required. --Cameron Scott (talk) 07:57, 21 August 2010 (UTC)


 * A pretty useless discussion. People like you, in the long run, will manage to turn wikipedia into an abstract container of useless info with no relation with developers' world. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.48.34.65 (talk) 22:38, 21 August 2010 (UTC)