Comments on: [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: Cody

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 05:52:25 +0000

I held onto them for a long time, but moved to CD quite a few years ago and haven't built a drive into my PCs for the better part of the last decade.

What I find funny is how Sony talks about the 2.88MB disks, which were really rare as hens teeth. Almost everyone had 1.44MB and also those hacks that formatted a couple of the extra inner tracks and let you store a couple fractions of a MB more (1.8MB?)

Come to think of it, I wrote a program to format or test those inner tracks. That's probably one of the first utilities I wrote. I wonder if it's around on the internet somewhere. It was so long ago I'd completely forgotten and I have no idea how I did it …

But it wasn't very good anyway, and I think I used a 3rd party one.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: magallanes

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:34:52 +0000

did Sony invented the 3 1/2 floppy?.

They are amazing inventing new format.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: Alan

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:50:56 +0000

Everyone keeps bashing on floppies. To this day, I still use them like crazy. Although with Windows 7 its not really needed anymore. XP had a fuss with AHCI drivers and you needed either a internal or usb floppy drive if your bios supported it to load the drivers durning the XP setup. That or waste time burning another xp cd with the driver slipstreamed. Most laptops today have a bios failsafe which only works from a usb floppy drive. This actually saved my life as durning a bios update (insert long stupid story) and it bricked. Luckily for me, I had my trusty usb floppy at hand. I made the correct format of files on the floppy and had restored the pc. Saved my self there. So i always carry my usb floppy and at least 2 disks because sometimes they go bad on me.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: Exin3

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:34:10 +0000

3,5″ Disks are still the most reliable method on transferring data between Internet capable PC's to naked old systems like the Amstrad CPC and the Atari ST for example. i still have a disk box full of 3,5″ disks that are completely incompatible to each other for various systems as C64 (1581), ZX Spectrum (PlusD), Atari ST, Macintosh… I also have big boxes only with 3,5″ and 3″ disks for Amstrad CPC only.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: Leland Barnes

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:11:25 +0000

I keep a 3.5 floppy drive and an Epson SD-800 dual 3.5″ / 5.25″ combo drive in my office just in case any users comes by with a disc that they need to retrieve data from. happens all the time.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: Moondog

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:14:52 +0000

Other than the occasional running of DBAN at work, I haven't installed a floppy on any of my personal pc's in 9 years. I have one old pc running with a floppy I use to search my old floppy collection.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: TheSaintOfPain

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:58:20 +0000

I have a USB, plug-n-play 3.5″ floppy drive that gets semi-regular use on my current PC, when transferring old files from older comps. Other than that, I use my 2GB flash drive/MP3 player, 1TB external hard drive, or DVD-R's when I store files.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: Zoyous

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:03:35 +0000

The last time I used them regularly was to store samples for my Ensoniq Mirage 8-bit sampling keyboard, which was sadly slain by a power surge several years ago. I kept the disks around for a long time, in case I got another Mirage, but eventually I finally resigned to adapt to using software samplers so I don't accumulate so much hardware. There are ways to attempt to imitate the sound quality of older hardware samplers like that, but nothing really gets it right.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: BDD

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:57:28 +0000

I use them on my Mac SE/30 occasionally when I need to move a quick file from one of my other Macs. Once my network card arrives, this may be the end of the floppy for me…

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Sony 3.5″ Floppy Disk by: Matt

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:34:43 +0000

Still use them all the time, for server disk wipes, images, etc. Also on workstations here and there for Boot & Nuke.