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floydb1982
join:2004-08-25
Kent, WA

floydb1982

Member

What happend to 2.88MB Floppy Disk's

For a while there it seemed that they made 2.88MB floppy Drives yet stopped and went back to 1.44MB floppy Disks. 2.88MB floppy's hold twice as much data as a 1.44MB floppy. Why didn't the 2.88MB floppy's replace the 1.44MB floppy's??? My dad had a 2.88MB floppy Drive and yet he could never find any 2.88MB floppy Disks but 1.44MB floppy Disks only. Did they even make any 2.88MB floppy Disks at all to go along with the 2.88MB floppy Drive???

DKS
Damn Kidney Stones

join:2001-03-22
Owen Sound, ON

DKS

Dead format.

»www.pcguide.com/ref/fdd/ ··· 0-c.html

Krisnatharok
PC Builder, Gamer
Premium Member
join:2009-02-11
Earth Orbit

2 recommendations

Krisnatharok to floydb1982

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to floydb1982
I think you're realize this more than a decade too late...
Aranarth
join:2011-11-04
Stanwood, MI

Aranarth to floydb1982

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to floydb1982
Basically what happened to 2.88 floppy drives was zip disks (100mb) and more importantly CD-R's. (650 to 750mb)

Cd-r's and DVD-r's are on the way out because of high speed internet (dropbox etc) and usb flash drives.

The only time I burn anything anymore is if the machine I'm working on cannot boot off of a usb stick or I'm making an hd image or I'm burning an iso.

DC DSL
There's a reason I'm Command.
Premium Member
join:2000-07-30
Washington, DC
Actiontec GT784WN

DC DSL

Premium Member

said by Aranarth:

The only time I burn anything anymore is if the machine I'm working on cannot boot off of a usb stick or I'm making an hd image or I'm burning an iso.

I only burn for protected/read-only distribution, point-in-time/audit backups, or archiving.
HarryH3
Premium Member
join:2005-02-21

HarryH3 to floydb1982

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to floydb1982
At the time, 1.44 MB floppy drives cost $20 or less. 2.88 MB floppy drives cost around $100. This created the chicken and egg scenario where there were not enough drives in the field to justify making the disks in large (and low-cost) quantity. Thus the drives AND the disks were priced absurdly and failed miserably in the marketplace. Then Iomega came out with the Zip drive 100 MB and the Jazz drive (1GB).

Then another bit of magic came along... Cheap PC networking. Sneakernet was no longer required.

Make yourself a note to ask a similar question about Intel's Thunderbolt 10 years from now. They have it and the cables it requires priced at a similarly absurd price point. I forsee it failing also.

DKS
Damn Kidney Stones

join:2001-03-22
Owen Sound, ON

DKS to Aranarth

to Aranarth
said by Aranarth:

Cd-r's and DVD-r's are on the way out because of high speed internet (dropbox etc) and usb flash drives.

That presumes everyone has high speed internet, which is not true. With bandwidth caps, using "the cloud" is counter-intuitive. Just as well to back to a USB HD.
Aranarth
join:2011-11-04
Stanwood, MI

Aranarth

Member

I'm not presuming anything, this is actually what is happening.
(You can assume people who are using dropbox have high speed internet of course.)

Otherwise as I mentioned people are using USB flash drives and yes some of them are using external hd's if they need more space.

I suppose one additional thing that is putting cd-rs and dvd-r in the dust bin of history is literally waste. Flash drives can be used and reused many more times and much more reliably and cost effectively than rd-rw and dvd-rw disks.

DC DSL
There's a reason I'm Command.
Premium Member
join:2000-07-30
Washington, DC
Actiontec GT784WN

DC DSL

Premium Member

said by Aranarth:

I suppose one additional thing that is putting cd-rs and dvd-r in the dust bin of history is literally waste. Flash drives can be used and reused many more times and much more reliably and cost effectively than rd-rw and dvd-rw disks.

Unfortunately, flash is NOT acceptable as backup for applications requiring permanently unmodifiable "true" copies of data. Applications subject to HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and a slew of other regulated activities must use backup that cannot be altered once laid down and removed from the host. So, until a new mainstream "write-once" storage technology emerges, recordable optical and even tape will persist.

Cthen
Premium Member
join:2004-08-01
Detroit, MI

Cthen to floydb1982

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to floydb1982
Price is what happened.

Later they came out with 120mb floppies around the time Zip Disks came out. The price of blank media was around $30 - $40 per disk for both. Compare that to the price of 10 cents per disk when it came to CD-R blank media which came out at that time as well and has more capacity, you have a no brainer on what consumers chose.

DKS
Damn Kidney Stones

join:2001-03-22
Owen Sound, ON

DKS to Aranarth

to Aranarth
said by Aranarth:

I'm not presuming anything, this is actually what is happening.

Dialup is alive and well and living in rural areas.

neonhomer
Dearborn 5-2750
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join:2004-01-27
Edgewater, FL

neonhomer to HarryH3

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to HarryH3
said by HarryH3:

At the time, 1.44 MB floppy drives cost $20 or less. 2.88 MB floppy drives cost around $100. This created the chicken and egg scenario where there were not enough drives in the field to justify making the disks in large (and low-cost) quantity. Thus the drives AND the disks were priced absurdly and failed miserably in the marketplace. Then Iomega came out with the Zip drive 100 MB and the Jazz drive (1GB).

If I remember correctly, you could reformat a 1.44 disk as a 2.88 disk, similar to how one reformatted a 720K 5.25" to 1.2MB 5.25". It was just a gamble on whether it would hold your data or not...

Dustyn
Premium Member
join:2003-02-26
Ontario, CAN

1 edit

Dustyn to floydb1982

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to floydb1982
TIME WARP: »Looking to buy a 2.88MB 3.5" Internal floppy Drive

DrStrange
Technically feasible
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join:2001-07-23
Bristol, CT

DrStrange to floydb1982

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to floydb1982

Re: What happened to 2.88MB Floppy Disks

Nobody was interested.

I used 155MB mini CD-RWs formatted using DirectCD [UDF format, read/write]. A mini CD-RW in a jewel case is the same size as a 3.5" floppy. They were much more plentiful and much less expensive than 2.88MB floppies, Zips or SuperDisks [120 or 240MB floptical, looked like an overweight floppy].

Dustyn
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join:2003-02-26
Ontario, CAN
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Dustyn

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Click for full size
I still have my ZIP drives... and disks. I remember they also suffered from a thing called "The Click Of Death". Thankfully neither of my units were affected.
I had the external parallel port version which still works to this day... along with an internal drive. The last operating system that supported these pieces of hardware natively, was Windows XP 64-bit Edition. I retired them after Vista and onwards. I could not get the external version to work in any later OS.

DKS
Damn Kidney Stones

join:2001-03-22
Owen Sound, ON

DKS

said by Dustyn:

I still have my ZIP drives...

I had both, as well. Long gone to computer recycling.

Jan Janowski
Premium Member
join:2000-06-18
Waynesville, NC
·Carolina Mountai..
Synology RT2600ac
Linksys E2000

Jan Janowski to floydb1982

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to floydb1982

Re: What happend to 2.88MB Floppy Disk's

Have one 1.44Mb floppy/Media Card disk on a server.... Used it as a floppy couple times to upgrade Bios... and to load disk controller driver during an OS install. That's the last time I ever used it as a floppy. Used as a Card Reader quite often, so I don't feel so bad....

Dustyn
Premium Member
join:2003-02-26
Ontario, CAN
·Carry Telecom
·TekSavvy Cable
Asus GT-AX11000
Technicolor TC4400

Dustyn

Premium Member

My computer doesn't have an internal 1.44MB floppy disk drive. However, I have an external USB drive in case I need it for some reason. It sees little to no use... but it's nice to have and easy to move around. The last computer I have that's still in use that actually has one built in is my Pentium 4 IBM ThinkCentre. If it were to break down, no biggie... I have like 10 spares sitting in a drawer.

Octavean
MVM
join:2001-03-31
New York, NY

Octavean to Dustyn

MVM

to Dustyn

Re: What happened to 2.88MB Floppy Disks

Same here, I still have both my Zip drives (Parallel and IDE) as well as a 1GB SparQ drive.
Thordrune
Premium Member
join:2005-08-03
Lakeport, CA

Thordrune to Dustyn

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to Dustyn
I have an external SCSI Zip drive in my closet that was given to me a few years ago. The last time I tried it with my old Mac, it worked fine. I also have another one (external parallel I think) at work, boxed and shrink-wrapped.

Anonymous_
Anonymous
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join:2004-06-21
127.0.0.1

Anonymous_ to floydb1982

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to floydb1982

Re: What happend to 2.88MB Floppy Disk's

said by floydb1982:

For a while there it seemed that they made 2.88MB floppy Drives yet stopped and went back to 1.44MB floppy Disks. 2.88MB floppy's hold twice as much data as a 1.44MB floppy. Why didn't the 2.88MB floppy's replace the 1.44MB floppy's??? My dad had a 2.88MB floppy Drive and yet he could never find any 2.88MB floppy Disks but 1.44MB floppy Disks only. Did they even make any 2.88MB floppy Disks at all to go along with the 2.88MB floppy Drive???

I had a 64MB floppy disk it used sony MS sold that sucker for 80$
Sony Memory Stick floppy Disk Adaptor MSAC-FD2M
pandora
Premium Member
join:2001-06-01
Outland

pandora to DC DSL

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to DC DSL
said by DC DSL:

Unfortunately, flash is NOT acceptable as backup for applications requiring permanently unmodifiable "true" copies of data.

Nothing is permanent. Media storage devices change over time. Eventually the current DVD readers will be obsolete, and it'll be difficult or nearly impossible to find one. DVD's can be easily shattered, and their life expectancy for data storage is not infinite. A burned DVD is going to have a much shorter life expectancy than a pressed DVD if the pressed DVD was made properly.

On modern PC's virtually all the first generation PC interfaces are gone. Hard drives have evolved over several interfaces and generations.

IIRC there was at one point a choice that users could make by controller type for RLL or MFM encoded storage on a hard drive. RLL gave more storage. My very first PC hard drive with RLL could supply 110 megabytes and cost several hundred dollars. I was told by the salesman it would never be full, that there would never be 110 megabytes of data to store on it.

Today I take pictures that are larger in MB than that drive on an under $300 camera.

As to the OP, 2.88 MB floppy drives never caught on, as traditional 1.44 MB floppy drives were dying when 2.88 was released. It was released too late and cost too much. Microsoft made a push to release software on CD's about the time 2.88 was trying to come out. I had a Microsoft developer account, and recall getting a 1x CD reader (no burner) for the amazingly low price of just over $200. The drive could hold 640 MB of data.

Instead of needing many floppy drives, one CD drive would work.

Today World of Warcraft requires 20 GB to install. We just download it as needed on new systems. Even the traditional DVD dual sided standard is insufficient to hold a game of this size. Blu-ray drives hold up to 50 GB, my guess is within a decade 50 GB will be too small.

Today I couldn't read an MFM or RLL drive from an old PC. Somewhere I have a USB floppy disk reader, it may be 2.88 MB, but it was never used.

Today's SATA will eventually be a dead storage technology and readers will be hard to find.

Cheese
Premium Member
join:2003-10-26
Naples, FL

Cheese to Aranarth

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to Aranarth
They aren't out anywhere, anytime soon

jadinolf
I love you Fred
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join:2005-07-09
Ojai, CA

jadinolf to Dustyn

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to Dustyn

Re: What happened to 2.88MB Floppy Disks

said by Dustyn:

I still have my ZIP drives... and disks. I remember they also suffered from a thing called "The Click Of Death". Thankfully neither of my units were affected.
I had the external parallel port version which still works to this day... along with an internal drive. The last operating system that supported these pieces of hardware natively, was Windows XP 64-bit Edition. I retired them after Vista and onwards. I could not get the external version to work in any later OS.

I still have two zip drives installed. They are for my Quicken backup.

AlphaOne
I see
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join:2004-02-21

AlphaOne to floydb1982

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to floydb1982

Re: What happend to 2.88MB Floppy Disk's

I believe ZIP at some point contributed to the 2.88 demise.
I still have about 2GB worth of 100mm zip disks.
And that's the reason why I haven't got rid of my ZIP drive which happened to be in the once awesome Gateway 2000 Pentium II 300mhz, circa 2007.

urbanriot
Premium Member
join:2004-10-18
Canada

urbanriot

Premium Member

said by AlphaOne:

I believe ZIP at some point contributed to the 2.88 demise.

No, Bournoulli came before Zip drives and there was another product I used to come across quite often that was external SCSI and I cant recall its name. It was popular on workstations (before Jaz came along).

I have 2.88 MB floppy drive around here and a Toshiba Superdisk / LS-120 drive which was intended as a 120 MB storage drive which read floppies too. They never took off due to Zip's existing popularity.

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

aurgathor

Member

said by urbanriot:

No, Bournoulli came before Zip drives and there was another product I used to come across quite often that was external SCSI and I cant recall its name. It was popular on workstations (before Jaz came along).

SyQuest?

urbanriot
Premium Member
join:2004-10-18
Canada

urbanriot

Premium Member

Right! And they released the notorious Sparq! If you owned a Sparq and had a few cartridges that worked, you should never, ever buy another cartridge or use someone else's as there were many bad disks that would break drives and the company was terrible for replacing them under warranty. Basically you buy the drive, buy 5 cartridges, cross your fingers and if they all work and the drive continues to work, that's it, use that combination forever.

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

aurgathor

Member

I did have (and probably still have) a 44 Mb SyQuest drive and a few cartridges -- they were OK, but optical media and HDs got cheaper, and I never bought any more SyQuest drive. I think their products were reasonably good until they tried to cost reduce them.

DC DSL
There's a reason I'm Command.
Premium Member
join:2000-07-30
Washington, DC
Actiontec GT784WN

DC DSL to pandora

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to pandora
said by pandora:

said by DC DSL:

Unfortunately, flash is NOT acceptable as backup for applications requiring permanently unmodifiable "true" copies of data.

Nothing is permanent. Media storage devices change over time. Eventually the current DVD readers will be obsolete,

You clearly did not understand what I was talking about. *Permanently unmodifiable* does not have anything do with longevity of the medium.