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Linux Kernel's Floppy Disk Code Is Seeing Improvements In 2020

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  • #31
    I still have some DVD-RAM media and all of them still work properly. Unluckily, my old cartridge compatible driver from Panasonic died and I had to extract the media from the package. But I don't really use them that much, not even pendrives, except to create installers. All my data moving happens through the network. When there is no direct network access, not even with VPN, I just 7zip the whole thing with a password and use google drive, dropbox or skydrive, works pretty well. Don't see myself using an old floppy anymore, though, TDK provided pretty reliable ones (still have and old computer with a floppy reader combo for 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 from Epson, damn good piece of hardware).

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    • #32
      Originally posted by skeetre View Post
      Zip drives and Jazz drives were the bomb!
      Zip drives were the time bomb. Seemed really good and spacious at first, but then once your drive got the click of death, suddenly you just lost a whole lot of data... POS.

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      • #33
        I use 3.5" floppies at work to transfer images from an old Tektronix oscilloscope...

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        • #34
          Originally posted by eydee View Post
          My computer has a floppy drive in it. My motherboard has no connector. It's just sitting there, all day long, disconnected. Poor floppy drive.
          I was in the same situation for several years... the case originally came with a floppy drive, and removing it would have left an unwanted hole in the front panel.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by ssokolow View Post

            It's sad that flash drives with hardware write-protect switches seem to be extinct now.
            I have these bookmarked on AliExpress:



            Though I can't guarantee that switch is a /physical/ hardware write protect. My own interest is more in them being SLC flash.

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            • #36
              Originally posted by M@GOid View Post
              Yeah, the race to the bottom came with high unreliability of the disks. People say that even floppies weren't all that bad in the 80's. Memories of frustration while trying to access data on some disks (CDs too) made me a early converted to flashdrives. I still have my first one, a blue, 1GB Corsair Flash Voyager (still works!).

              I remember a day doing a 45 min bus ride to a friend's house to bring back a pack of floppy disks full of arcade ROMs (MAME), only to find out that disk 5 or 6 was corrupted... (in the "single big Zip file in multiple disks" days). Still makes me mad 20 years latter.
              In the early 90's I recall there were floppy disk brands you avoided like the plague if you valued your data. And as the 90's progressed, more and more and more brands joined the list. Until by the end of the decade, none were left.

              And then I got my very first USB thumb drive!!! It was 16MB!! ... (yes M)
              Last edited by Viki Ai; 17 March 2020, 04:37 AM.

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              • #37
                Did they even bother to test the change on a real floppy drive?

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by DRanged View Post
                  got myself an external USB floppy drive that worked surprisingly well.
                  The floppy driver is only for devices without shrinkwrapping by a protocol such as USB or Firewire or otherwise.
                  The same is true for SD card readers, and you can verify that: /dev/mmcblk0 will only show up if your SD reader is direct-attached. If it's some kind of USB-based reader, you will see media showing as /dev/sda instead.

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                  • #39
                    To some extent, I think a floppy is still required to start installing MS Windows XP on some platforms due to SATA drivers not being included, with no IDE->SATA controller drivers fallback.

                    I still have a IDE and USB floppy drives here.

                    My real fear is adding broken code, breaking the floppy driver. And when adding any code, bugs are usually expected. Adding a lot of code like this, is likely ripe for a broken driver for some moth-balled floppy disk maker, not found until years later, with nobody to fix when needed!

                    I think before making such drastic changes like this, the driver should fork into new/old driver, or a version 1 (old) and version 2 (newer) driver for fallback.

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by M@GOid View Post
                      Yeah, the race to the bottom came with high unreliability of the disks. People say that even floppies weren't all that bad in the 80's. Memories of frustration while trying to access data on some disks (CDs too) made me a early converted to flashdrives. I still have my first one, a blue, 1GB Corsair Flash Voyager (still works!).

                      I remember a day doing a 45 min bus ride to a friend's house to bring back a pack of floppy disks full of arcade ROMs (MAME), only to find out that disk 5 or 6 was corrupted... (in the "single big Zip file in multiple disks" days). Still makes me mad 20 years latter.
                      The original 8" and 5.25" floppies worked very well. Even if you bent one 90 degrees you could continue to use it - it would just be a bit more noisy because of friction.

                      But already from day one, the majority of brands of 3.5" diskettes were bad. And from there it just went downhill. So with 3.5" - even with good brands - it was more a rule to save everything twice. With 5 diskettes worth of data spread over 10 diskettes it was normally possible to recover everything without a loss. Sneakernet transfers could be quite frustrating back then. And hooray for 50 kB/s transfer rates...

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