In case you haven’t noticed, floppies are dead. In most cases if you purchase a new computer, you’ll need to specially add a floppy drive. None of my laptops have floppy drives and I haven’t missed them yet. My new office desktop does have one but I don’t expect to ever use it. What that desktop has is eight USB ports six of which are in use at all times.
So, what’s the replacement for the floppy. Well, I can definitely tell you it’s not a
Zip disk. (Do any of you ever recall a patron coming in with a Zip disk to use on those Gates computers?) The replacement is known officially as a
USB flash drive, more commonly known under various names including “jump drives” and “flash drives” and “thumb drives”. The funny part about that is that they’re not actually drives in the sense of a floppy disk drive or hard drive. Unlike the drives we’re used to, they contain no movable parts, and require no power to keep your data on the chips inside.
Flash drives are so robust that I’ve even accidentally run one through the washing machine and, once it dried out, it worked perfectly and hadn’t a single byte of my data. Additionally they hold much more than a floppy (1.44MB) or CD (800MB) ever will. A typical flash drive today holds a minimum of 1GB and newer models with more storage space are coming out monthly.
As for price, lower than you might expect.
Tiger Direct has a 2GB flash drive for just $14.99 (after a $5.00 rebate). Those of you that need (i.e. want) more portable storage you can get a
32GB flash drive for the low low price of $539.99. Though really, 2GB will be more than enough for most people today. (In a few years, who knows.)
There are also many things you can do with a flash drive that you couldn’t dream of with a floppy. These include running
Portable Apps: programs that you install on your flash drive and can then run on virtually any computer you plug your drive into, and even
install an operating system on your drive and taking your computer with you.
So, if you don’t have one yet, get yourself one or put it on your Christmas wish list.
My flash drive (same as the one pictured) has been through the washer and dryer two or three times. Still works fine.
Portableapps.com has an backup program that’s quite useful, if you lose your drive just restore to a new one. You might also want to check out my presentation of portable applications (shameless self promotion, I know!) http://dalziel.org/karin/publications-presentations/portable-applications/
Love my flash drives to bits, but I just wanted to add that, yes, we do still occasionally get patrons into the lab at our library who use zip discs. So, they haven’t completely died out, and it’s a good thing that our Gates computers are still equipped with built-in zip drives!
Scott,
Do you encourage those patrons wit Zip disks to move away from them and start using flash drives? I think I might encourage floppy use before zip disk use.
–Michael
Oh, absolutely, and most of them are eager to do so. But, there are still some diehards who continue to use their zipdiscs…not as many as, say, two years ago, but they still exist. So, it’s not accurate to speak in total absolutes about the death of the zipdisc quite yet!
Maybe in another year or two… 😉
‘Course I’m sitting at my home computer staring at a stack of ten full or mostly-full zipdiscs of my own that I still haven’t converted to flashdrive storage, so maybe I should be speaking!