My parents had a partial case of unformatted 5.25″ disks that I still suspect of being QC failures, since every single disk would show errors just by being formatted. You must be astonishingly lucky or not rewriting much. Yes, I know there’s always storing it i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶l̶o̶u̶d̶ on some stranger’s computer. If only I could get a medium with the reliability of a floppy and enough storage space to be practical with today’s files. So what’s the favorite storage medium today? USB stick? I’ve had several of those go bad too.Īt this point if it isn’t on at least two hard drives located at separate physical locations I just don’t consider it to be saved. The disks were of several brands purchased at many places as were the disk writers.
Yet after a few years EVERY disk was at least partially corrupted. And everything that I didn’t also have stored on a hard drive was lost! They were all in jewel cases, those jewel cases were carefully stored in drawers in the climate controlled house. On the other hand I stored all my stuff on CDRs in the early 0s. And that was a disk that I lost track of and was banged around in the bottom of a box of junk for a year. (not counting user error where I formatted the wrong disk of course). I can remember exactly one time where a floppy failed and I lost something. I used floppies from the mid 80s through the 90s. I don’t get why whenever there is a post about floppies someone says they are unreliable.
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Sure, any instance where your software is divided among several physical items is going to suffer from the fact that a failure in any one of them leaves your software unusable. “As anyone familiar with the reliability of floppy media knows, it only takes one bad disk to ruin everything.” Posted in Misc Hacks Tagged 747, flight, floppy disk Post navigation It turns out you can even fit an entire podcast on one, too! We’ve also seen floppies used as an even more inefficient method of data entry. Certifying new hardware for flight is a major cost that is difficult to justify when the current system still works.įloppies continue to cling to relevance, even if for most of us it’s simply as the save icon. While retrofits are possible, it’s more likely that airlines will simply stick with the technology until the legacy airplanes are retired.
As anyone familiar with the reliability of floppy media knows, it only takes one bad disk to ruin everything. As Aviation Today covered in 2014, legacy aircraft often require updates involving up to eight floppy disks, leading to slow updates that can cause flight delays. Engineers responsible for loading updates must perform the process manually on the ground.Įfforts have been made in some areas to replace the disks with more modern technology. The floppy disks are used to load navigational databases which need to be updated regularly, every 28 days. The news comes from the work of Pen Test Partners, who recently inspected a 747 being retired as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. As it turns out, though, there is still hardware that relies on floppies – namely, the Boeing 747-400, as The Register reports. Slow, limited in storage and easily corrupted, few yearn for the format to return, even if there is some lingering nostalgia for the disks. For garden variety daily computing tasks, the floppy disk has thankfully been a thing of the past for quite some time.