What was it like using a floppy disk?

What was it like using a floppy disk?

shit.

It was like a flash drive that made noise and was bigger.

Mounts faster than optical drives. Rekt.

Comparing a flash drive to a floppy is a lot like comparing a ssd to an hdd.
One is slower, bigger, had moving parts, and at the time of its widespread use had much more storage capability than flash drives

it was alright for text documents but not much else

I still use them at work

...

Wasn't there a way to reformat them so you get about 1mb more space out of them?

Yeah, you had to punch a hole through them.

Still use one every day.

I only remember using them to install SimFarm

They were slow, clunky, made weird noises. 1.44 Mb of storage, take some or lose some if you used a weird file system. Remarkably reliable considering what they were and how cheaply they were produced. They're a little strange considering how everything's moving in the direction of solid state electronics right now, like how audio technology moved towards solid state over vacuum tubes and whatnot, the floppy disk had a number of points of failure.

Zip drives were the cool ones. Their failure rate was pretty high, because it was pushing the boundaries of what the floppy drive based tech could even accomplish, but they were built to store between 100 and 750 Mb, which was sick nasty back in the day, failure rate be damned.

thats what you get for using meme arrows

It was super shit.

The use itself was crap.
But the feeling of inserting a 3.5" disk and removing it was just wonderful.

Relatively useful for .doc files and .jpgs with less than some 100k each. Had to rely on splitting files to get larger things on them and they were slow as shit. As cool as they sound in principle and literally (clunk clunk scree), it's a technology that has no practical use whatsoever, unless you have a device with only floppies as storage (ancient CNC machines are a prominent example).

I don't miss them in any way. I just have them around in case there's a device that relies on them for data transfer.

Terrible. They broke easily, were slow, and barely held any storage once we got to the point of actually being able to download images consistently. Only cool thing was slipping them into your binder since they were so thin and portable.

its like having a pile of 1 gb memcards to download 4k full movies

Individual quality varied, there were good examples and bad from the same box and the only way to find out if you had a good one was through use. Bad disks don't work well from the start and make funny noises. End up relying on a small subset of good ones for everything, re-writing those till they died horribly.

Slow as fuck! I installed Windows 98 with it. Several hours needed

there was a little clip you could move left/right to lock it from being read, that was kind of cool. my school made us each get one to use in class and they sold them for $1, which seemed like a bargain to 7 yo me but was probably a scam.

Yeah, they got corrupted all the time. If the slider was made out of aluminum, there was a good chance it would bend and get stuck in the drive. The sound they made was terrible and if you inserted one it want unusual for your machine to lock up until it had been properly mounted.

They weren't floppy and they were very slow.

it was much better than using tapes.

Fun to think about, but glad they’re gone.

Shhhtleck...
Baranbaran-tzzzbaaaaanbaaaaaanbzzzzztbzzzaaanraaaan-tc-tc-tc-tc-baaaanraaaanbaaaanraaan

Absolute sheit.

Comfy as fuck. It's not liek you needed more than 1.44 MB back in the days.
t. oldfag

cheap and intuitive

Kids get out

aesthetic but slow af.
also faulty!
the tended to die randomly either right after use or down the line

you even got "duds" in new packs..
the contacts and the card readers were very sensitive to dusty particles and flash quality between floppies varied a lot.
not to mention magnets @_@

it sure was fuckin cool in elementary school because it was the first year that student could take home their own work and physically own a copy

the year before they just had cdroms which would of been too expensive for every student and less portable/more vulnerable physically to scratches

Necessary, considering the obscene price of hard drives back then. Most people loaded their OS from A:\

No, it depends on the density of the disk.

definitely aesthetic, esp 3.5" drives
I love the snapping sound when you insert the disk into the drive, or how it pops when you press the button.
you just can't get that feel from inserting a USB stick

For me they didn't just die randomly. They would just accumulate bad sectors. Read error reading stuff.jpg Abort Retry Fail? running norton disk doctor, PC tools diskfix, or later microsoft scandisk was a must.
an antivirus was also a must. gotta catch them boot sector viruses!

Sharing DOS games with it was the shit.