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Is the floppy disk dead? As an useful format the answer to this is a resounding... Probably... After all it's a venerable format first introduced in 1971. Though it has gone through many incarnations since it reached maximum capacity at 2880Kb in 1991. Since then the world of computer storage has moved on and though many PCs are still supplied with floppy drives and floppy disks are still being sold in the shop perhaps it's time for this storage solution to finally fade away. After all, there are other solution which will perform the floppy disk's function equally well: if not better.

History:

A floppy disk is defined as a storage device composed of a ring of thin, flexible, magnetic storage medium enclosed in a square or rectangular wallet (originally this was made of cardboard but it subsequently became plastic). The first such disks, produced by IBM, were 8" square and read only and were used as boot-up disks for IBM's System/370 miniframes. These disks held 80kb of data.

In 1973 IBM released the next generation of these disks which were read-writable for the first time and stored 256kb of data. For the first time one could download data onto a portable disk and use this to move information between machines. In 1976 several companies developed a concept for a smaller 5¼ inch disk that was both more compact than and had a larger storage capacity than the 8" version. By 1978 several companies were producing incompatible rival versions of the format. Despite this the 5¼" was adopted widely. Though these disks proved popular through the 1980s their limitations were becoming apparent. At this time most computers still did not hard drives and the operating system was kept on a single floppy. This meant that to run an application the disk with the floppy had to be removed and the disk with the application inserted. Though some machines were available with twin drives the problems of this system were apparent. By the final quarter of the 1980s, however more PCs were being build with internal hard drives and by 1984/1986 larger capacity floppy disks with hard plastic coating and a metallic sheet protecting the recording medium were starting to appear.

Once again there were several competing solutions, and it was Apple's decision to adopt Sony's 9cm × 9.4cm plastic-coated disk (which they termed to 3½" floppy which effectively made this a standard in the US. Though the 3½" floppy started at 720KB a high-density format (1440KB) labelled HD was introduced in 1987 and a year later Apple adopted this as their standard drive. This marked the effective death of the 5¼ drive which was cemented by Microsoft's decision to only supply Windows 95 on 3½" disks.

By the early 1990s the 3½" had become the standard for the transfer of applications and data between PCs. The compact size, relative toughness and storage size made the disk almost ideal. In 1991 a new extended density 'ED' format was introduced by NeXT Computers. However, this coincided with the advent of relatively cheap Hard Drives of 10Gb and above. As a result the ED floppy disk never really caught on and the 1440kb high density 'HD' remained the standard for a portable data storage device and the floppy disk drive was an essential component on every PC. So essential in fact that it was almost impossible to think of a computer without one.

Floppy Disk Rivals

By the early 1990s several companies began working on rivals to the now ageing floppy disk format. One of the notable contenders being Insite Peripherals who, in 1991 produced the 'Floptical'. This employed an infra-red LED to track marks on the disk surface, allowing the writing heads to be positioned more accurately. As a result he drive could store 21Mb of data whilst still being able to read and write standard floppy disks. Unfortunately they had to use a SCSI connector to provide acceptable data throughput and this made them look like a hard drive so that most PCs could not boot from them. This limited their uptake though Insite did manage to license their technology to a number of other companies. Most notable of these was the LS-120 'SuperDisk' drive launched by Panasonic and Imation. These drives could store 120Mb of data onto their own drives whilst still being able to read and write standard floppies. Unfortunately the drives gained a (probably undeserved) reputation for unreliability which affected adoption.

Perhaps the most successful of the 'super floppy' formats was Iomega's 'Zip' drive. However, this was not true to the original 3½" form factor and thus was not compatible with standard floppies. The disk itself was also thicker and felt bulkier than a floppy. However, starting at 100Mb (then 250Mb and 750Mb) the Zip disk (released in 1994) appeared at precisely the right time, just as digital image manipulation was starting and the need to transfer large files between machines became a necessity.

Largely as a result of this, the Zip drive gained in popularity during the late 1990s, but never quite succeeded in achieving the market penetration of the floppy drive. In large part this was due to the CD-ROM and later the DVD drive with its larger storage capacity.

One of the last entrants into the 'Floppy Killer' market was the Sony HiFD; Sony's own floptical-like system. This was released in 1997 and industry insiders confidently predicted that the true 'floppy-killer' had emerged. This was the device, they said, that would finally replace floppies in all machines. However, due to production problems, performance and reliability issues the product was pulled after only a short time in the marked leaving the CD drive and its descendants as the most likely product to finally see-off the floppy drive.

Floppy Drive: Do you need one?

The basic answer to this is almost certainly: No. In two years' time the floppy drive will almost certainly be an extinct format (for the reasons see below). At the moment though we're on the cusp of that obsolescence and floppy drives are a very cheap component. You almost certainly don't need one, but as all motherboards still come with a connector and it's not going to cost you very much you might as well add one.

The Floppy Drive: Is it Dead?

The death-knell of the floppy drive sounded in 1998 when Apple produced the first Mac without a floppy drive. This was probably a little early to take this step and sales of external hard drives boomed for a while. However by today no current Mac has a floppy drive and few, if any, are buying external drives. Indeed, in February 2003 even Dell, Inc, announced that they would not be supplying floppy drives on some of their home computer ranges.

In truth history and the advance of processing power has made floppy drives obsolete. Faster and more powerful processors means that a modern PC can process far more data than even two years ago. This coupled with the rise of digital photography mens that much larger files are being produced than any 3½" can accommodate.

Technology has also caught-up in other ways. Advances in solid state technologies mean that up to 1Gb of data can be held on a flash-ram that's little larger than the size of a keyring fob. The ultimate in large-scale portable data storage. Read/Write CDs and DVDs also mean that large volumes of data can be stored in these media and as almost all software comes on these media such drives have become the de-facto standard (just as floppies became the standard of the 1980s). However, the main technology that's diminishing the importance of all these data transfer systems is the increasing availability of wireless communications (allowing direct communications between local computers) and ADSL/Broadband which offers rapid communication across the internet. After all the floppy drives (and all its successors or would-be successors) were simply means of transferring data. The floppy is dead, and it's a good thing.

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