Alternatives To The Floppy Disk? 462
"I'd like to experiment with something with at least 4 to 8MB capacity. I'd also obviously need a "drive" to allow reading / writing to the media. Ideally it'd be something you could mount inside a computer in a 3.5 inch drive bay. Regardless, as far as interfaces go USB is probably the best option. Cost-wise, the "drives" should be out there for $40 or less. (I've noticed Sandisk offers their USB CompactFlash drives for $29.99.) I'd prefer that the cost of the media be the "heavier" end of the solution.
CD-RWs are not an option for a few reasons, the main one being that CD-RW capable drives are still quite expensive. I'd like to avoid anything that includes as many mechanical components as the antique floppy disk / drive combination. We offer our students space on several file servers, but for many, many reasons the use of floppy disks remains commonplace. We are not a tech-heavy institution: the majority of the students could probably be considered "average" for their age group in terms of computer use. I guess in that sense, part of the reason floppy disks have stuck around is that they offer enough space to save a few documents, and do so in a small, easy-to-use package. However, after all these years, it would be nice to think that someone out there is pushing forward with a standardized, low-capacity, high-reliability alternative."
Floppy alternatives in University Setting (Score:2)
I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:5)
I can understand the problem with a lot of old disks being reused, and a lot of old drives being around that are maybe past their planned lifetime, but I'm having trouble on machines that are no more than 3 or 4 years old, some new a year ago. Has this being happening to anyone else, or am I just jinxed? :)
Re:I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:5)
To be cliched a little.. (Score:3)
Floppy: Low capacity, mediocre reliability, amazing price. Probably why they're still around. If you want to move small documents, pictures, binaries, etc. then floppies are a good choice. The down side of course being the point of this article.. The reliability thing.
Sandisks: Variable capacity, high reliability, high price. The drives are small and based on USB, so theres no real worry about where you can and can't be able to read your paper. However, the USB drives are cheap, but the smallest Sandisk is 8 megs for $40 (MSRP). That's $5/meg, which by any standard is horrendous. Of course, it does suit the portability and reliability.. But students probably won't want to spend $40(disk)+$30(drive) just so they can get term papers back and forth.
Network: Virtually unlimited capacity, variable capacity, variable price. I like the idea of everyone having a little network share that they can always access. It's not too hard to implement, even across platforms. Of course, what do you do when the network is down or you want to take it home to a computer that isn't wired? This makes the option largely moot.. Physical media are a guaranteed thing.
Unfortunately, you won't find many more options past these ones. The 'big floppy' drives (LS-120, Zip) are out of the question (drives cost a pretty penny and are hardly a standard).
Your best bet? Beat some sense into the students. Floppies are your friend but they aren't flawless. Make backups, have spare disks on hand, etc etc. You'll convince a lot more people to do it that way then to spend enough money for a couple hundred floppies.
Zip drives will do the job (Score:2)
Easy to understand (it's just a big floppy), high capacity, fast. Internal (IDE) or USB connections are what we use, SCSI and Parallel also exist.
Highly recommended.
The perils of a public machine (Score:3)
I'm not sure about your college's lab machines, but at both my previous university, as well as the one I attend now, the public lab machines tend to be very "unclean". Heavy use, high traffic, accessable to everyone and then some, drives tend to accumulate dust, dirt and gunk at a high rate. Add on to that the stuff scrapped onto the heads by unclean, old disks used by the person before you and you get an environment ripe for disk corruption.
That said, I believe that disk quality has gone done, if only due to the economics. With bulk disk prices being so incredibly low, quality control is probably just another drain on the slim profit margin.
The answer is radiation! (Score:2)
Add to that the concommitant increase in local radiation broadcast towers for the cell-phones - plus towers & satellites for pagers and TV.
We're being saturated by radiation everywhere we turn - I'm surprised that floppys last as long as they do, and that they don't glow!
Read "Waldo" by Robert Anson Heinlein for an insightful look at where this may end up.
On the other hand, maybe you should buy a better brand of disk, and clean the heads on your drives.
No floppys anymore (Score:2)
About two years ago I realized that floppy disks were not useful anymore, so I never use diskettes anymore, I don't even have any of them.
I store files at my home computer or at my account in the school, if I need to transfer from place to place or share with somebody I use either email or FTP. For really big files I use CD-RW.
Another possible solution would be that LS-120 floppys (120 Mb).
By the way, I would like to know if slashdotters use diskettes or do just like me.
Re:Floppy alternatives in University Setting (Score:5)
I do agree that the Zip disk is the closest thing to a floppy sucessor we have thus far, and is probably the best choice, but they are just a prone to failure. Just do a search for "Zip 'click of death'"
It would be great if the technology used in digital cameras would hit mainstream as a portable media, I don't know if you have seen a modern memory card but the thing is tiny! Its about as thick as a credit card, and the size of a quarter, and holds 16/32 megs. Might not seem too impressive to you yung'ins, but in my day..... ;)
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Network Storage (Score:2)
I work mostly with large images, and to copy them to floppies would be a nightmare, and to use zip disks is simply too slow. With our nice, switched, 100mbit network I can store up to a couple of hundred mb, easily enough for, well, anything really.
So, if transportability isn't a concern, then consider giving everyone accounts on a file server somewhere that can be easilly accessed from anywhere on campus. (or simply encourage the use of it, if you've already got it going)
Expense makes proprietary floppy drives unfeasible (Score:2)
So Zip media remains $A25 for 100Mb, while CDRs remain $A2 for 650Mb. You can read the zip disk on a few machines, you can read the CDR on nearly all drives. Zip disks take an extraoridinary long time to save, while 8x IDE CDRs can be had for around $A300 [$US150ish, since we have a pathetic tech economy and our dollars pretty weak]. Zip drives cost around $320 for a retail USB 250, [I'm not sure how much for 100Mb or OEM, but it will be more than a CDR]. Zips have moving parts. CDRs don't.
Yes a CDR isn't rewritable. But the media and drive costs more than make up for it. You wan't to write another disk? Spend $A2 and break your old one in half.
Oh, and remember, the writing times on an 8 x CDR [around 8 mins] are much less for smaller amounts of data [not a full CD]. Its likely your students will only be writing small amount sof data [10Mb, its nearly instant].
Don't use removable media then... (Score:3)
Re:More reliable? Use two? (Score:5)
False assumption (Score:2)
Your assumption that CD-RW drives are expensive is a false one. You can get internal CD-RW drives for as little $94 (+S&H) nowdays, which seems relatively close to your target price. (As with most components, buying the rock-bottom cheapest isn't necessarily a good idea, but hey, if that's what you can afford, that's what you get.) And media costs have dropped dramatically too, with CD-RW disks being basically $1 a piece for 650 MB capacity. For low-end prices, check out Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] (no affiliation).
There is another slightly older alternative, the ZIP drive. OEM internal drives are as little as $34 +S&H at pricewatch, with media costs running ~$5-10. There are three significant problems with this approach: 1) reliability, 2) single source issues, and 3) obsolescence. In my experience, ZIP drives are not particularly reliable. There's a fairly well-known phenomena called the "Click of Death" (do a google.com search to find out more) that plagued drives during one period (my sister's ZIP drive had this) and there was a huge class action lawsuit against the ZIP maker Iomega. Second, the ZIP drive standard is essentially owned by one company, Iomega, so your ability to switch to alternatives is limited if you run into problems or if Iomega jacks up prices and gives up competing on the merits to optimize their profitability (as they should). With CD-RW you have a variety of drive manufacturers competing voraciously for marketshare and prices will continue to drop substantially. And third, ZIP is a standard on its way out. People used it when CD-RW drives were $300+, but with CD-RW drives now under $100, the alternative fits a much broader set of consumer needs. ZIP media has smaller capacity and is less versatile: you can't just take it to any student or faculty or employer's PC unless they too buy a ZIP drive. Every computer is built with at least a CD-ROM reading device... the power of network effects is all on the side of CD-R(W).
There are two basic uses of removable media: 1) moving files between PCs and 2) backing up your PC. For a drive standard to be widely adopted you have to meet both of those reasonably well. Backing up a 10 GB drive with a 100 MB ZIP is obviously a return to the problems of swapping floppies and is one reason CD-RW is picking up steam over ZIP. The other is the rising interest of people in 3) making audio CDs, something that CD-RW has made very popular with the teenage and college crowd as well as the mainstream public. Wannabe successors to the CD-RW drive (cough, DVD, cough) ignore consumers' interest in doing so at their peril.
Buying ZIP and trying to get 20,000 students to go along with your choice would be penny wise and pound foolish. You'd end up having to support the ZIP standard for the next 15 years when its already on its way out and has about 5 more years of life left. (Insert wild hand waving gestures here... ;) We may never have something as completely ubiquitous as the floppy was. But with steadily dropping prices, the CD-RW drive is coming increasingly close. ZIP won't be the next floppy. CD-RW will.
--LP
Some informative links (Score:2)
Imation [superdisk.com] sells disks that hold 120 MB, have the same dimensions as regular 3,5" disks, and the drive can also read old (1.44MB) disks. These things rock. The drive will cost you about $75-$100 or something.
Castlewood [castlewood.com] manufactures 2.2 GB portable disks that cost $30 each (the drive is a little expensive though)
IOMega [iomega.com] sells 100 and 250 MB disks for around $10 or so
I'd advise you to try the Imation drive, then decide for yourself whether you like it. I sure did.
LS120 anyone? (Score:3)
Sony have a similar product, HiFD [sony.com]. Apparently it's faster than LS120, holds 200Mb and of course, is not compatible.
While the LS120 is slower than a zip, it's main advantage is that it completly replaces the floppy drive. Yes you can boot from it on new motherboards, and linux recognises it just fine (/dev/hd ). Also, with syslinux [kernel.org] you can boot small distros, such as LRP [linuxrouter.org] and get the same advantage as with a normal floppy: You can write-protect the media, easily.
It's just the thing you need for backing-up your data... if it weren't so expensive (both the drive and its media)
Just on a side note, I've read the new superdisk drives will let you format normal floppies to up to 32Mb, but can't find the reference to this anywhere... any link?
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Re:Floppy alternatives in University Setting (Score:2)
Re:Floppy alternatives in University Setting (Score:2)
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All generalizations are false.
Re:Floppy alternatives in University Setting (Score:2)
A few options... (Score:2)
Floppy disks - low capacity, slow, unreliable. not a great option, though fine as a secondary/tertiary backup.
Flash media - fast, low-medium capacity, reliable, and some of these can even be used in floppy drives using an adapter, obviating the need for a special drive. however, they are VERY expensive per megabyte, and won't drop any time soon. also they are small and easy to lose.
Zip drives - high capacity (100-250M), reasonably fast (scsi and usb), reasonable reliability (i've never had problems, though they are still potentially affected by strong magnetic fields?). the drives are somewhat expensive, but the media is cheap and getting cheaper all the time, especially the 100s.
Jazz drives - very high capacity (1-2G), reliable, fast, but very expensive. at something like $100 a disk, that's a bit much.
LS-120 - reasonable capacity, not too fast, about as reliable as floppies, heh. bonus here is that a LS-1230 drive can read floppies as well, so if you need to upgrade many machines to do this, you can simply replace the floppy drives instead.
other options exist, such as:
Provide network backup - set up a system (web-based?) where users get X amount of storage to access from wherever they want. reliable, fast internally, versatile, though may be an unneeded maintainance headache (warez kiddies, etc)
CD-RW - fast read, slow write, high capacity, high reliability. media is kind of expensive - at this point it's usually worth going for CD-R instead, the media is so cheap it's expendable, and writes faster. writable drives are still costly though, especially reliable ones.
What will probably accomplish more is instilling a good sense of backup in your people, if possible - encourage them to make backups regularly and often, on at least two separate media, and how to treat the media.
What may clinch it for one over another here though is how you implement it. obviously every machine has a floppy drive (or not?), but you may be able to attach a resource to the network, say one per 10 machines, used for backup purposes, instead of bolting one onto every machine. this would lower the installation costs of something like cd-r and zip, which are my two recommended options in this sort of installation. cd-r for portability (and implicitly usability elsewhere in any cd reader), zip for backups.
Fross
Re:Don't use removable media then... (Score:2)
-- yes, attachments do take up space on the mail server, and they do slow transfer times, but:
- They can access that file from just about any computer on campus.
- The LAN is nice and speedy
- Everyone checks/uses their email multiple times per day
- (there is a 10MB limit on attachments, too)
Besides, many of our clusters computers are iMacs, so the use of floppies is a moot point!!Solution?Make the network drives very easy to access and very large (maybe 100MB per student). If the students can just log in to a shared directory and drag-and-drop, they will use the system. Even if it has reduced functionality from the current system, making it simple and secure are the top priorities.
Remember:If nobody uses it, it doesn't matter how darn cool the system is!!
______________________________
Re:Minidisc (Score:2)
Intentional Ignorance (Score:2)
Re:Use the Iomega ZIP-drive (Score:2)
Zip is alot more reliable than floppy. I've bought about 40 disks, and only two have bit it over the years. I actually used to install/use MS Office 95 (using drvspace) so that might have hasten it's death, as it was constantly thrashed. I love my zip plus drive, and have not had any issues with it.
Of the 4 1GB jaz and 2 2GB jaz, only 1 1GB disk has died on me so far. Not too sure if this common, but that one disk never seemed right from the start. It spins at a very high speed, so maybe any misalignment could be blamed.
Smartmedia is pretty flimsy, and limited in capacity (64MB). Flash is a lot stronger better, and can go larger (I have a 96 MB flash which is very useful) My biggest fear is losing them - they are so small. On the flip side, it's the only media types that can be stored easily in a pants pocket.
I have not used my CDRW media recently, I currently only have one, and it was expensive at the time. If it's anything like CD-R, then I worry about scratches. I'm constantly re-burning the same images over and over due to wear from foreign CD-ROM drives.
I'm pretty hard on my media, so hopefully this useful info. I'm for Flash first, but it is expensive. Transferring info to them can be slow if your "flash drives" are cheap too.
A real alternative (Score:2)
That is a very popular way of data transfer between experts and experienced users. In fact, for the last two-three years is the only form of data transfer I see being used apart from networks. Floppy drives are only used on booting computers and even this is dissapearing. Some computers are already living without their floppy devices attached to them.
Note that this practice is not only used by the geeks here. Even people like accountants and financial directors rip the cables of their HDDs without pitty and carry their "hard floppies" in their suitcases. The most funny was to see an woman accountant carrying a HDD in her VERY SMALL pursecase. It looked as if the HDD suddenly grew three times when she took it out.
A 3Gb HDD costs here almost 30 dollars. A package of floppies nears 10 dollars. Why I would pay for 43Mb if I can get 3Gb for that price?
The best of both worlds (Real life example) (Score:2)
Zip drives are on every machine. They are also on the Macs and some of the newer Sun boxes. The only thing holding people back is the cost of zip disks, being as how college students are cheap. They rather spend that kind of money on a $7.00 case of beer. Also, I've seen zip disks fail due to physical damage, but there is nohting you can really do about that. As far as physical media goes, it seems the best way so far.
There is also an AFS client that runs on all of our NT systems (Gina I think). It just maps a drive to your home space on your university account, which makes it much more automatic and simpler to use then FTP. Different drives are used for Home, Pub, Mail, etc. because some people are confused about changing directories. Suns use your university account, so that isn't a big deal. Most Sun users seems to be a bit more in-the-know. Macs have the Zip drives, but they also have ftp clients installed (Fetch is my personal fave). But it does have its problems. Most people don't know that these drives exist, or just ignore them because they never seen a Drive X: or drive W: before. Also, there are brief times when the network is overloaded. But there aren't really any space concerns, as each student gets around 25 megs per account. Note that your account also holds your NT profile as well as your Netscape settings for both the NT and the Unix systems, but 25 megs is plenty for the average user. Also, there used to be a few bugs with the AFS client we used, like the networked drives not showing up on some logons, etc. Most of them have been fixed as of now. And there are rare cases of the network being overloaded, but it is rare.
And yes, we have floppy drives. And our lab managers have lost-and-found boxes full of some of the abused floppies you will ever see. Bent in half, metal gates missing, overused AOL floppies that are used to store that "20 page paper". In my day, I showed people how to use the network drives AND their old-school floppies. They have a "copy" that they can hold in their hands, and a backup that can be gotten easily.
Just email the document/data to youself (Score:2)
can't beat emailing it to yourself. And maybe
CC a copy to your Yahoo mail account to.
Re:The answer is radiation! (Score:2)
Another possiblity, which, while it does not fall in your price range, but could prove far more useful is the Digital Wallet [mindsatwork.net], from Minds@Work. I was thinking of picking up one of these for me. It holds 6GB of data, has a PCMCIA slot and USB connectors (works with Macs or Win98/2000). Only downside is the cost (nearly $500). However, consider that today, many universities are requiring students to purchase notebooks that cost on the order of $1500-3000. This is 1/3-1/6 that cost, solves your storage problems, and is pretty cool to boot.
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Please cite year 2000 prices, not 1997 prices! (Score:2)
[Re: CD-RW] media is kind of expensive Maybe in 1997 what you said was correct, but here in the year 2000 you've got it completely backwards. CD-RW media is cheaper than Zip media, by a long shot.
A simple pricewatch [pricewatch.com] check shows that 6 dollars gets you either one 100MB zip disk, or ten 650MB CD-RW discs. In price per-megabyte terms, CD-RW media beats the heck out of Zip media.
Trek Thumbdrive (Score:3)
A student could wak up to a machine, pop his thumbdrive in the front usb port, copy his data to his thumbdrive, pop it out and be off home. At home, his computer most likely has USB. Just pop in the thumbdrive and repeat.
Only Windows drivers currently, but Mac and Linux are supposed to be soon to follow. Its just flash ram... how hard could it be?
Floppies do not use magnetic storage (Score:4)
I believe at the time our scientific conclusion was that floppies are not based on magnetism, but on "tiny bubbles of ectoplasmic phlogiston." We never tried the condition where the file was the sole copy of some critical document, I don't know if that would have affected the results.
If you are running the place... (Score:2)
Thats right. Pitch 'em.
Force them to use a network. Teach them how. Get the proper infrastructure in place. Yes this will cause you some short term pain. In exchange you'll have a simpler, easier to maintain network and in the long run, life will be better.
Floppies are not absolutely necessary components in a computer especially since it is very possible to boot off of CDs. If you must allow them to carry something let them access the CD drive and tell them they need a CD burner. (they aren't that expensive) If you are feeling nice, make a few workstations available where you have CD burners in place and let people copy their floppies to CD's there.
The sooner everyone take these steps, the sooner we can bury the floppy. It's overdue.
Don't look for an alternative! (Score:4)
Obviously some users are going to complain "how can i take my work home to my home computer?"
Keep the floppy drives (cheap/free - you already have them) just somehow make it impossible to save directly to them, but make it easy to copy from the file server to floppy!
To sum up, force it into their thick skulls to keep multiple copies
Re:I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:3)
I can't remcomend flash memory. I've got a rio with a bad sector 0. opps. I've also got two 32mb memory cards and they both have lots of bad blocks and they are getting worse.
CD burners in a public lab is a disaster. With a floppy you trash 1.4m, with a cd that goes bad you end up trashing up to 640mb.
Anytime you have a public lab, your going to have touble with the media. It doesn't matter if its 3.5" disks or CD rom burners they all are going to become flakey because they get more use than they are designed for and are never maintined. The cheapest solution may be a rotating schedule of trashing the floppy disk drives.
Compact flash is out. Ever see thouse little pins on the connectors? They aren't public lab friendly.
Smartmedia. You can now get upto 64m on a small foot print but my use with the rio shows they aren't that easy to work with.
At a trade show I saw a USB flash device. It looks like it would come in small (4m?) and larger (64mb) and extra large (mp3) sizes. I don't know who makes it but it also had some sort of ID code that could be used to authentcate people as an excuse to get them installed.
Network Drive - NFS/AFS (Score:2)
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Matt Singerman
Re:Just email the document/data to youself (Score:2)
that's what i always do. only instead of CCing to a throwaway account, I also upload it to a geocities account so i can fetch it later (i'm taking classes at a community college which won't allow use anything but port 81, so i have to be able to send through HTTP or else I'd just upload it to my own server through FTP.
Not that easy to corrupt (Score:2)
What was really memorable was that even with *some* handheld magnets right next to the floppies, I didn't succeed in corrupting the data, iirc. With sufficiently powerful (rare earth) magnets, I did corrupt it, though.
At least one of the preceding posts about cell phones and microwave radiation is probably just uninformed nonsense. The magnetic fields from the sources mentioned are maybe a billion times too weak to have any effect. So few people study (and actually understand) physics that such nonsense may seem plausible; sorry to squawk.
What's surprising is that both floppy and "hard" drives contain some magnets that, if placed in contact with the recording surface, would surely erase the bit patterns. If you pull apart a hard drive, youll find that the magnets in the head actuator are remarkably powerful; their stray fields are well controlled, though.
Btw, didn't I read (in Debian?) somewhere about the importance of using only the best floppies for boot and image disks when setting up Linux?
I surely hope we don't need to do a Scramdisk on all floppies before recording important info.!
Enby the curmudgeon in Waltham, Mass.
FTP + ubiquitous internet access (Score:2)
You can use that 50 megs your ISP gives you, or the school could even give some space on the local net.
Odds are, you already have all the hardware you need in place (or use that $40/drive to buy a big HDD to add to the server that would be providing the service.)
-Peter
University Backed Up Storage Servers (Score:4)
When I first started out (Score:2)
My advice. Teach them a couple times. Then forget about it. The cream will rise to the top.
Little hint... (Score:2)
Re:Intentional Ignorance (Score:2)
the cost argument for file servers (Score:2)
Consider that out of the 20K students at your university (and few hundred staff and faculty), maybe about half would be enthusiastic about a network drive. Multiply that by a quarter of your price point for the media drive, $10. $10 per student, times 10K students, equals a pretty beefy file server with RAID 5 and tape backup, with a little left over for setup costs and training.
If your university is anything like mine, $100k isn't the kind of money you'll be able to easily lay your hands on. If you're low in the procurement food chain, you'll need to make the argument to your higher-ups. If you're higher in the food chain, you may already have this kind of cash in the budget, but if not, be prepared to defend your decision to funding sources. Write up your understanding of the problem, as well as costs for competing solutions. You may even want to consider doing a straw poll of students to see which they'd prefer: new media types, a file server, or keeping the status quo.
Backups (Score:2)
If I was writing a dissertation I'd be sure to have a hard copy (refreshed say monthly) and a couple of magnetic or optical copies around just in case.
Yes. Replace the floppy. (Score:2)
"I ran, um, Scandisk on it...five times," she said.
"And you're surprised you have corrupt data?" I almost said, but I kept silent.
I took the disk home, took it to my Linux machine, and it read the file okay. I noticed the disk was very old and the little metal thing stuck when it tried to slide back. I transfered the file to several different formats on five different disks and drove the 10 miles to the girl's house.
All right, I guess the girl may have had an excuse to think floppies were the medium of the day. She was using a 386 with a character-mode word processor (Maybe Wordperfect somethingancient). Apparently, it was a very simple case of PEBKAC* "Oh, Windows is broken on this computer, I hate it."
Turned out the file formats I'd saved it in (txt and rtf seemed pretty reasonable to me) -- neither would read quite properly on her word processor, so she spent the evening taking strange little characters out of each sentence of the ten-page document.
I offered to save the file in a more readable format, but the girl's mother stepped in. "Bethani, ** she's done more than enough for you. Why don't you let her go home, and you just get all the stuff cleaned out of your paper by yourself, okay?"
Relieved, I left.
I will, on occasion, run a half-block away from here (my res hall) to the Science Center to print something off, on a floppy, but I always have a backup on my drive. I do this less and less lately as I ftp things up to my favorite ftp server and simply retrieve it from one of the workstations. Floppies do have their uses, but those uses can really only be counted on to be hackish runs to the lab to print something, or boot media.
* (PEBKAC-Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.)
** (Names changed to protect the innocent.)
CDRW (Score:2)
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CitizenC
Re:To be cliched a little.. (Score:2)
I don't see how you can beat the price and reliability of a network drive. The usability is splendid and there is virtually no chance of losing your data.
When I have to transfer 2 gigs of raw data to my home computer nothing beats just sticking it on the network drive.
Re:False assumption (Score:2)
Hmm
If you do use floppies regularly... (Score:5)
1) One-time file storage for temporary transfer. They are not permanent storage devices. This bears repeating until somebody silk-screens it on the front of t-shirts.
2) Do not carry the floppy around loose in your back pocket, wallet, purse, knapsack, book bag, pencil box, lunch box or thermos. A floppy disk is not a book mark. A front shirt pocket is perfect, if the disk is wrapped. If you have a plastic sleeve or floppy holder, use it. A Zip disk case will hold at least two floppies. This will increase the likelyhood that the floppy will work as intended and keep lint, sweat and fuzz out of the disk.
3) Do not work off/from the floppy. Copy the file you want over to the hard drive first, work on it there, then copy it back if necessary. This will prevent errors from interfering when saving your document. If you find that you cannot copy the document over, or you find that once the document is copied to the drive, there are problems or errors, you save yourself the grief of finding out later when you lose all the work you just did.
4) Consider using a "safety" folder on the disk which contains an extra copy of your important document. Do not make a duplicate of the folder already on the floppy. Instead, copy the document afresh from your hard drive to the safety folder. This is common practice in the creative world, a legacy from pre-Zip, pre-Jaz days when Syquests and floppies were standard.
5) If you don't have server access, consider mailing a copy of a document to yourself using free web email accounts. Make sure to use at least two services at a time as they are unreliable. This will allow you to avoid faulty or unworking floppy drives as well, which in a busy lab situation can mean the difference between getting right to work or waiting for the "good" machine.
Spread the word! Tell everyone! Post signs! How many times have I tried to explain that floppies are unreliable, tempermental and not to be trusted only to find that people don't believe me? They think I'm making it up. Really.
I used to run the IT department for an advertising agency in which one of the users saved *everything* to floppy because she believed her hard drive was untrustworthy. She had hundreds of disks. (Of course, this is the same woman who printed out all of her email messages and filed them alphabetically).
Trek Thumb Drive OR Sony Memory Stick Reader (Score:4)
For the Thumb Drive, go here [thumbdrive.com].
For a review of the Sony Memory Stick Reader, go here [asia1.com.sg]. Now, all you need to do, is to move the USB Ports to the front of the computers!
\\'ilson
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Re:Minidisc (Score:2)
Re:Portable mp3 players (Score:5)
How about handing out rio mp3 pocket players
I bet most people thought that was a joke. Including the author.
They were wrong.
http://www.dansdata.com/cfide.htm [dansdata.com] is a review of an interesting product: A Small, cheap adapter to let you use a CompactFlash memory card as a plain IDE drive. Only AU$38. It is doubtless availiable in the US from other suppliers, and a large order would probably be quite cheap.
Qoute: If you were wondering whether CompactFlash cards really could work as plain old IDE devices, this adapter ought to put your doubts to rest. The thing's just, essentially, a pin converter. 40 pin IDE connector on one side, standard pushbutton-eject CompactFlash socket on the other, power connector hanging off on a wire. It doesn't even have an activity light.
If you can put up with the cost of CompactFlash cards (Which can be very high, although I don't have any details to hand), you have here a very nice storage solution; just plug it into an IDE cable and tell Windows it's a removable disk drive and it's installed, and your students can get cards in a range of capacities, from one or two megabytes to 500+. It has no moving parts, so not only is it reliable, but it also provides VERY fast access. Solid state drive, anyone?
A lot of mention have been made in this discussion of zip disks. I would like to take this oppertunity to say: Noooooo! Zip disks suck! They often lock up and won't read, and the capacity is big for just holding documents, but too small to install your programs on.
If you don't mind about accessing files from non-school computers, why not set up your computers to create a mapped drive to \\server\username, where a user's files are? This would be easy to do, and could be like a floppy drive but without the floppy, and with a different drive letter. People wouldn't be able to use zip disks or whatever on thier home computers either, so this would work quite well if people have individual usernames. You'd also be able to see who's saving pr0n to disks on the school's connection.
Other than that, I'm not sure what to suggest. There's lots of potential solutions out there, and wrtten elsewhere in the discussion. I'd take a look at them.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
With linux, use fdecc. (Score:2)
I have had the same experience as you when it comes to the reliability of floppies. I.e. I can't use them on the machine in my office and take them home an hour later and expect them to work. Both of my machines have clean drives even (in fact both are relatively new).
When I am working under Linux (and I am), I use a little program called fdecc to improve my odds. It uses the secondary FAT to record error correcting data. On a 1.44M floppy I can have several bad sectors and the disk is still recoverable. This has been a real convenience many, many times.
You really have to check it out for yourself if you use floppies:
Re:To be cliched a little.. (Score:2)
Re:Trek Thumb Drive OR Sony Memory Stick Reader (Score:2)
Re:University Backed Up Storage Servers (Score:2)
He already has taken that cost hit as implied when he said:
We offer our students space on several file servers
What I'm presuming is that these storage servers have not been web-enabled.
If they were web-enabled, students would go to their personal home page on the university file server, invoke the file manager for their personal home page, click a browse button, select the file to be saved and click the upload button.
It would be a good idea to disable public directory browsing by default, of course.
Re:The perils of a public machine (Score:4)
Yes! Definitiely perform periodic cleaning, maintenance, and testing of the public floppy drives! At least give your students a fighting chance to have a drive that CAN write reliably to their media.
But, it seems to me that the problem is that the errors were made SILENTLY. So, the real question may be: "How can a user know, immediately, when there's a problem?"
Under DOS or a Windows command prompt, you can use this command to copy a file, and, at the same time, verify the copy matches the source:
Though I don't know if it is true, today, but one used to be able to issue this command (IIRC) under DOS in your autoexec.bat file to force the system to verify every single file that was written: (NOTE: I almost exclusively use the CLI so I have no idea if this setting is recognized when using drag-and-drop to copy files.)Further defensive techniques
Re: The answer is radiation! (Score:2)
The answer is NOT electromagnetic radiation. The physics doesn't work. Not enough energy is delivered to the diskette by cell phones.
The answer is probably dirty diskette drives and dirty diskettes.
Students should make backups on three diskettes, as others have said. Total cost of media, 30 cents. If students are properly warned they will do this; it's silly to say students are stupid.
Diskettes should be kept in ZipLock bags when not in use. This is NECESSARY. Otherwise gritty dirt can work its way in and grind a streak in the media.
Re:Sony Mini-Discs or Memory Sticks? (Score:2)
Anyway, I'd recommend using CompactFlash cards instead. Its basically the same thing, except with more support.
--
Re: (Score:2)
Before using these, consider (Score:2)
Why not just force them to use proper backup procedures by posting in central locations around the computer lab that floppy demise will not be an accepted excuse for losing work?
Re:Please cite year 2000 prices, not 1997 prices! (Score:2)
must say i'm surprised, my Local Vendor here (in the UK) has zips for about $4 each, CD-RWs are about $1.80 each, so my comments were based on price compared to ease of use etc (i tend to reuse zipdisks a lot, but not CD-RWs, apart from wiping them and reusing from scratch.) i guess it's just because it's easier to delete a few files and then just throw a few more on, with zips.
Fross
Re:Floppies do not use magnetic storage (Score:4)
It is a fundamental law of physics that the reliability of a device is inversely proportional to the importance of that device being reliable.
If a floppy contains the only copy of a critical document, it will fail instantaneously. It might even burst into flames for good measure.
Of course, if you try to demonstrate this effect, it won't work. The Universe knows when you're serious or not.
What I do is... (Score:3)
1) The primary one that I have been using for the past ten years is to store my stuff on the network. In prcatice it is far more reliable than any portable media. The space is limited depending on what the sysadmins policy on quotas for students might be. This can be a problem for people working with large graphics files. At my school this is recognized and the students that need it are given up to 500MB of quota. For the rest of us... even the most prolific CS student or English major is not gonna use much more than 5-10M in their entire time at the uni (often much less) even using MS-Words appetite.
2) When I need to move large amounts of data I have a small device the size of a pack of cigarettes. It is an old laptop drive (1.4G). This works very well for me and I can even "hotswap" it between Linux machines. The cost was kinda high US$80 for both "base" units that fit in a 2.5" drive bay. The disk was "free" because I replaced the one in my laptop with a larger one. But "low" capacity laptop disks can be had for cheap. This solution has been extremely reliable and fast. I have been using it for the past two years with no problems. I only use this solution for large transfers of data that would be too time consuming from my home PC (56K).. to school and back.
By far the best solution would be to invest in more shared disk capacity on the servers at the school. As far as network reliability... it would still be cheaper to invest in a more reliable network. The network shares are shareable across all known platforms, at least from a Linux/BSD server. This would cost next to nothing for the school to implement.
Removeable media of the floppy, zip, etc variety are very unreliable. I would certainly not trust my semesters, let alone my lifes, work to a flimsy bit of plastic that is gonna bang around in a plastic case in my bookbag. Students are forever losing and/or mangling their removeable media... add to that the floppy drives, zip drives, etc all get mangled and broken in the labs eventually.
-DU-...etc...
In defence of CD-RWs (Score:3)
You've already got CD-ROMs in the machine, which can simply be replaced by CD-RWs on the spec sheets of new machines. So, the cost comes down.
Now, looking at retailers in the UK, floppy drives cost £15 each. CD-ROMs are going for £30, CD-RWs for £120 so we have an additional cost per machine of £75 if we replace both floppy and CD-ROM with a CD-RW. Hardly huge. The other sensible suggestion - LS120 - would cost £70 and you'd still need a CD-ROM, so the cost extra for that would be £55. For which you have to use media 5 times smaller and 5-6 times _more_ expensive.
If you stick with RWs, burning the CDs is really easy. If you then add DirectCD (lovely program) it's no different from using any disk. Yes, this requires the users to fit the drives to their own machines - but the same is true with anything other than HDD floppies. And the cost per megabyte is _tiny_ compared with any competitor.
Really, if you're committed to removable drives for the students, CD-RWs are by far the best.
USB ports on the front... (Score:2)
Newest HPs and Compaqs have USB ports in little lidded bays on the front of the machine. With so many digital cameras and other 'guest' devices like these, it's a great idea.
I use SanDisk's CompactFlash reader, but SanDisk also makes similar SmartMedia readers. Often, the digital camera you buy will help you make the decision on what sort of removable media you use. :)
The other solution to this is to get a small unpowered USB hub, and put it wherever you want. The only USB device that I have that won't run on an unpowered hub is my scanner, so it takes power from my second motherboard port.
Now, if only SOME camera company would make a simple cradle solution so I don't have to keep fussing with tiny power and download plugs and removable media at all!
An all too familiar problem (Score:2)
The instructor told everyone about how to use their floppy disks. He didn't even bother touching on the subject of the Netware file server we were logging into. Just that we had to log in to use the computer.
I had been using floppy disks when I was young and knew all about floppy unreliability. I saved everything to my network drive. I couldn't access the network drive from home so I copied them to my VMS account before logging off. Great.
Not a single other person in my class did that. They used floppies. When we first went in there was one computer with a bad floppy drive. I ended up using that one, no problem. Later on when the other floppy drives started failing, I ended up teaching them how to use their network drives (easier than floppies, imo).
Well, they copied the files to their network drives, then temporarily used another computer to save to floppy. a little better, but used only as a workaround. If they were at a computer with a working drive, they'd skip the network drive thing altogether.
I pushed the entire time, directly to a lot of people, the benefit of using UNIX accounts with NFS mappings. They finally started doing it after I finished... Oh well.
That said, I think the best solution is education. Have a seminar during orientation. Have a refresher at the beginning of each course requiring computer labs. That will help an awful lot. A number of people will have to unlearn things, but the earlier the better.
Remember, only you can prevent floppy disks.
Not every CD drive can read CD-RW (Score:2)
Re:I agree... (Score:2)
One copy of a critical file is never enough.
Re:Sony Mini-Discs or Memory Sticks? (Score:2)
Anyway, the Iomega Zip came out in March or so of '95 as well, and provided the same advantages (sturdier high-capacity media & near HDD-speed) but without the steep price.
Now it's 2000, and Sony is still trying to find a niche for the MiniDisc other than placing it in movies like TimeCop and Strange Days where they need a futuristic-looking storage media.
Perhaps the time is right for MD Data to make a return. don't remember the exact capacity of MD Data discs, but if it's 100MB or more then MD Data should be a viable format to go from PC to portable MP3 player. (Note that Sony's current MD MP3 player is a half-assed piece of crap that does not work like a solid-state memory-using player.)
~Philly
Wrong Question (Score:4)
Floppies are also fragile, VERY fragile. Left alone in the best circumstances they'll often bitrot in a few months. In the chaotic rough-n-tumble treatment of a students life they'll often last mere weeks reliably.
Number one killer of floppies by students? Headphones.
Particularly headphones dumped in the same backpack. HELLO - these are MAGNETS!!!! (Yes, /.'ers are rolling they're eyes but you wouldn't believe how many hs/college students have no idea of this & are shocked when told.)
Number two killer? Abused out-of-alignment floppy drives.
Particularly common on school computers these beaten-up drives caked full-o-crud are a disaster. US$5 mechanisms reading cheap warped floppies covered in crap, spending years filtering dust into their mechanisms, only to have a floppy get stuck inside and then pried out with the ungentle aid of some improvised tools & a panicking user. Machine A will write something that Machine B can't read but Machine D has a 50% of reading. It gets worse from there.
Third most common killer? Simple physical abuse of the floppy.
Repeated physical shocks. Detritus sifting in through the shutter while at the bottom of the 'pack. Being left in a sunny place to cook, dumped in a cold car trunk to freeze. Then of course there's the classic "Pepsi Syndrome".
So, what are the alternatives?
Super-High-density floppies have come & gone for several cycles. None have caught on, none likely will. Their limitations are all of the floppies limitations and their limited distribution doesn't make up for their extra capacity. Most folks don't care if you can save 4 or 50 meg on a floppy if you can't use it anywhere else.
Zip drives are all of the worst qualities of a floppy (slow, unreliable, same media but more fragile mechanism.) They're poorly built & at the end of their technology lifecycle anyhow. Many corporations are rueing the days they rolled them out en masse and are now banning their use for any critical material.
Orb drives? Sort of an "ultra-Zip" built by the refugees from SyQuest they've distinguished themselves with a delayed rollout, expensive media, and poor drivers. They're faster then the Zips but suffer all of the same media problems along with even less distribution.
Burnable CD's are less fragile but the burner costs more and in the hands of the unwary can often create "coasters" (don't interfere excessively with their disk access!) There's software available that does packet-writing to the CD and thus it appears to be simply another mounted drive (albeit a slow one) but it can be unstable itself & produces disks that aren't universally readable.
Portable hard drives were one idea for awhile. There was even a "DriveBay" spec that was floated. Unfortunately nobody ever really got behind it and it's died. One can still retrofit PC's with a similar sort of chassis to slot-load drives but they'll only accept certain designs.
SCSI drives are a long-time favorite of the Mac & publishing communities but with Apple's move from SCSI they too have waned. USB drives were popular for a week 'till folks discovered how painfully s-l-o-w they are. Firewire/1394/iLink (all different names for the same high-speed serial bus) have potential but their drives command a hefty newtech surcharge.
IBM makes an incredible line of microdrives ranging from 340 MB to 1 GB. These can be mounted in PCMCIA/Credit Card devices and slipped into laptops (& retrofitted desktops) but they also cost a bucket.
Unfortunately all of these drives share something in common - they're hard drives and to a great extent share their limitations. Abuse them a bit & they'll fail catastrophically. Even the ruggedized ones made for laptops have limitations that are daily exceeded in a student's life.
Solid State. The future of storage. It'll also require you to mortgage your future to buy. If you're gonna require folks shell out US$50-$200 for a chip it should hold enough to make it through the semester. Unfortunately that's not true of solid-state, not at today's prices and with MS Word files bloating to 20 MB each for a sigle major paper.
So, what to do?
Well, as you've seen once you abandon the floppy the choices are all either just-as-fragile, more expensive, and much less universal. Folks are using floppies 'cause they have them at home, in the dorm, at their off-campus jobs, etc. This won't work for exotic tech like the ones listed above. They all require significant costs to retrofit each campus machine plus each student must purchase the media for it and then it's pretty much useless or at least a major pain off campus...
As many, many folks have pointed out: Dump the media almost altogether.
Install a few central servers easily network-accessible and well maintained. Put a few well-maintained floppy drive equipped machines in each cluster of computers but otherwise drop support for them. Give all of the students a card detailing how to access them from both on-campus or from off-campus (home, work, other institutions, etc.) Teach all of the faculty how to accept material electronically. Set up special time-stamping directories with automated receipts so there's no "I emailed my assignment on time but you didn't get it" problems. Make sure the student's directories on the server's really are trivially accessible once they've gone through the password challenge, again both on & off campus. Support Windows networking, AppleShare IP, FTP, simple web-based access & WEBDAV, etc.
Novell Netware is fantastic at supporting large communities of users like this & has great educational pricing. Windows NT is popular for it's ubiquity & commonality with other installed systems on the campus. Linux is of course cheapest & infinitely flexible. Talk to your neighboring institutions to see what they're using & their experiences, attend a few conferences, you'll quickly get a good feel for where the trends are heading and what tools you really want to look into.
Wean folks from the physical-media habit. Yes, this will require a new set of skills on their part and things like passwords, encryption, & network security will now become much more important. On the other hand that all needed to be done anyway & in the long run is probably cheaper the supporting all of those floppy drives and their fried floppies.
geez, how about magneto-optical? (Score:2)
The MO media is a strong point. A hard plastic shell with a metal door protects the media from scratches, just like 3.5" floppies and Zip disks. But the media itself is relatively resistant to heat, humidity, impact, and magnetism.
In magneto-optical, data is read with a laser. It's simple, and works like a CD. Data is written, however, by first heating the media with a different laser to a near melting point, and then altering the 1's and 0's with a magnetic head. When the material cools, the bits aren't easily altered by magnetic force. (It would take so much magnetic force that the whole media would be severely bent anyway.) This results in extremely good reliability, but not so good write speeds. Nevertheless, writing is faster than a floppy, and many people put up with that. Notably, reading is very quick.
As for the economics, both ATAPI and SCSI drives are available. The least expensive models these days are the Fujitsu DynaMO's. Media is not very cheap, but would get much cheaper if more people used the technology and economies of scale kicked in.
Additionally, the drives are all backwardly compatible, from 640MB to 230MB to 128MB.
In short, if you are planning a solution for an entire campus of people, MO might not be the best solution, just because ZIP and CDRW are so cheap. But, if you're looking for a personal data solution, or need proven reliability, MO is the way to go.
Use ARJ, not ZIP! (Score:3)
Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea. The compression algorithm is such that any error partway through the compressed file renders the remainder of it completely unrecoverable. PKZIPFIX, which "recovers" a damaged archive, in fact only recovers that portion of the archive before the error.
A far better solution is to use ARJ [arjsoft.com]. The latest versions include a switch, -hk, for making a separate redundancy file. The type of redundancy used is sector-based, making it particularly suited to typical disk problems like bad sectors, cross links, and virus damage. Unlike PKZIP, ARJ can recover files that occur after an error in the archive. Archives that span multiple disks are treated as separate archives, so if it turns out disk 1 of 200 was completely unreadable, at least you can recover the other 199 sections. I don't believe this is possible with PKZIP.
Regards,
Internal ZIP drive, $35 on PriceWatch (Score:2)
If you think flash memory is a cheap alternative because the readers are cheap, you are ignoring the cost of media.
If you are thinking longer term, internal CDRW drives can be had for around $100. Consider that the media is less then $2 per GB (ZIP is around $50 per GB, Flash is around $1500 per GB).
Or take that $40 per computer and buy a couple tons of floppy disks, offer them free.... Or sell them below cost, say 10 cents each.
.zip is not LZW (Score:2)
Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea.
The .zip and .tgz formats use Deflate (LZSS + Huffman), not LZW. If the .zip format used LZW (it did in PKZIP's early years), then Unisys [burnallgifs.org] would be all over the Info-ZIP [info-zip.org] project.
Now, to "LZ-type algorithms are a bad idea on floppies because errors are not recoverable": I'll give you that one.
Re:I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:2)
I've got games for my Amiga on (low density) floppies that are over 12 years old and they still work perfectly, but newer disks don't live past 3 reformats.
One bit of advice: if possible, use old low density floppies; the data is much less likely to get messed up, since it isn't crammed together as much as it is with high density or *shudder* extra-density (2.88mb) disks, AND if the disks are older, they're more likely to be made of better material. I guess the phrase "They don't make 'em like they used to" applies here.
-- Sig (120 chars) --
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
Flash (Score:2)
But seriously...
I cannot believe that so many people keep things *solely* on floppies!
This only happens in universities.... all students should have an appropriate amount of reliable storage on the campus network, and have those same files available over the internet.
Re:I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:2)
Re:Little hint... (Score:2)
Do Not Feed The Troll (Score:2)
*ROFLMAO*
As if it weren't already obvious this were a troll ;)
Re:Floppy alternatives in University Setting (Score:2)
Floppy disks: You get what you pay for (Score:2)
Here's an Idea.. (Score:2)
I Remember seeing in a catalog for TigerDirect.com a USB 4M Flash Type Disk, Really small, just plugs into any usb port and is usuable.. IIRC The price was around 30$ or so for each.. each student would need only one and the cost would be low because there would be no drive to purchase. (they also offer other ones with more storage space) but this would solve the problem with disks going bad and everything.
Kenny
Re:I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:2)
Re:Trek Thumbdrive (Score:2)
Floppy Quality Reduction (Score:2)
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
Re:The perils of a public machine (Score:2)
This is not generally true, though perhaps some unusual GUIs do it. The overhead of verification is enough for most people to turn it off, even in the CLI world. The difference in speed is due to the overhead of GUI apps, no doubt - CLI copy tools evolved on much slower systems and are now blindingly fast.
In fact, when copying a full hard disk of files from a Win95 system to Windows NT via SMB via the Windows Explorer GUI, I was amazed to find a whole bunch of files missing. SMB had managed to quietly fail, with absolutely no errors, and of course the GUI had not noticed. (The problem went away when Win95 was the client to Samba on Linux - the bug was either in smbfs or in Win95's flaky server capabilities.)
Re:I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:2)
Presumably what's happened is that the demand for floppies has dropped dramatically, so the disk vendors have had to cut costs equally dramatically to stay in business. Seems like quality has suffered in the process.
Re:If you do use floppies regularly... (Score:2)
Haha, heh. Sorry, I had to laugh. Your advice is good. It's just that I've been transporting my Netscape Bookmarks file (and a dozen other zipped 'info' text files) back and forth between work and home every day for two years now.
On a floppy.
In my jeans pocket.
Squished between my wallet and my thigh.
Through the heat and humidity of summer, and the deep freeze of a Canadian winter.
Have only had one disk failure so far. Of course this is just temporary transport.
There was once a time when I was storing lots of data to hundreds of floppies, back when hard drives were very expensive. No, it wasn't important information. But I used around 300 floppies, all bought new, back when they cost 40-60 cents each. The cheap kind.
Of those 300, approximately 5-10 had a few bad blocks right out of the packaging. After a full year and a half of storage, another 5 disks had bad blocks.
So what's that, a 5% failure rate?
When I do back up important things to floppy (which I still occasionally do, for things like passwords and pgp key files and other small important files I'll need if my entire HD goes kaput), I put 3 copies of the same thing per disk, on at least two disks. And then I make sure and schedule a 'check' day every year or so, where I verify that all copies are still working, and make new copies when necessary.
Speaking of floppies... (Score:2)
--
Re:I don't trust floppies anymore (Score:2)
Can ext2 remap bad blocks as well?
Re:Minidisc (Score:2)
Re:Portable mp3 players (Score:2)
> A Small, cheap adapter to let you use a CompactFlash memory card as a plain IDE drive.
That's spectacular! I didn't know that! I've got an extra IDE channel and a 48MB CF card that goes with my Camera. Interesting.
However, being a straight through IDE thing, I bet you it doesn't take well to hot-swapping :)
ZIP sucks...theres a new kid in town! (Score:2)
Well, I just bought a new removable media drive a couple days ago called the "Orb" and it rocks...It beats the hell out of ZIP drives left and right. Check it out:
* 2.2GB storage
* Much faster than ZIP...like an older HDD
* Cost: ~$169
*** 2.2 GB Cartridge cost: ONLY ~$20!!!!!!
* int EIDE, int/ext SCSI, ext USB
And, as if that weren't enough...here's the REAL gem: The external USB drive is ACTUALLY the external SCSI drive, but with a SCSI-to-USB adapter, so you can plug it in to your SCSI adapter at home for SPEED, but still take it anywhere and use it through USB! KICKS ASS!
Check it out:
http://www.castlewood.com [castlewood.com]There is also a good review at www.tomshardware.com
-Brandon
Click of Death TRUTH (Score:3)
It is a real phenomenon.
When my system began to exhibit the symptoms I called my vendor's support line since it was still within the warranty period and they dispatched a tech to replace the drive within a couple of days. The tech confirmed for me that Zip drives are a major headache for them. They tend to fail on a regular basis.
Do you work for Iomega? You are spreading untrue claims in your message. The problem is NOT with the early models of the Zip drive. The problem is more likely to occur in NEWER models of the drive. Iomega has serious quality control problems and the problem started happening when they started to cut corners in manufatcturing. While it is true that you can damage a drive by dropping it, that is simply NOT the major cause of the problem although Iomega would have you believe otherwise. Do you think I dropped my internal ATAPI drive?
I urge everyone who has a similar problem to check out the Click of Death [grc.com] site for more information. Busted up disks CAN spread the problem between drives, but this is not really the underlying cause of most of the problems.
There have been class action lawsuits filed against Iomega regarding their Zip drive product. Their senior executives were finally forced to admit they had a serious problem. Sending people to their web site without pointing out the alternative explanation is a disservice.
AOL floppies (Score:2)
However, I've got what I'd like to call a miracle.
I have an AOL 3.0 floppy from back in '96 that has worked flawlessly, under fairly regular use, since then. On top of that, the disk's protective door no longer exists, and hasn't since about '97. I highly esteem this floppy - it seems to have been blessed by the Gods of Data Integrity, and is thus highly valued.
As of recently, I've had sooo many problems with floppies - you know the type that they sell at KMart in bundles of 20 for 10$ with a 9$ mail in rebate. Maybe 1 out of 4 has a problem with it. Thank goodness for networking.
-------
CAIMLAS
SmartMedia or MemoryStick (Score:2)
I find SmartMedia ideal: it's small, light, slightly flexible, and you can wipe the connectors clean if they get dirty. It's also manufactured by many companies and there are many readers for it, including a number of USB readers.
The MemoryStick is an OK design as well. Unfortunately, it's much less widely supported. One consequence is that you may have a harder time finding a reader that works for you.
better education (Score:2)
The only answer is better education. It's not perfect; there's only so much you can do to protect users from themselves; but it'll reduce the damage, and, well, education ought to be worth something in a university setting.
When I worked in a university computer lab, I took some of the long-abandoned or hopelessly corrupted floppies that were lying in the drawers, broke and cut and folded and burned them, and made posters using them. "THIS WAS SOMEONE'S SENIOR THESIS. (insert mutilated disk) MAKE BACKUPS." I put them up all over the lab. They certainly drew attention, and I think they may have driven the message (you do not want to lose your work to unreliable media) into people's heads.
Remove floppy drives. (Score:3)
Re:Portable mp3 players (Score:3)
A couple of clarifications:
> just plug it into an IDE cable and tell Windows it's a removable disk drive and it's installed
If you want hot swap, you need a card reader. <plug>I review a few recent ones here [dansdata.com].</plug>
; The CF-IDE, however, is excellent for no-moving-parts Linux boxes. 8Mb or 16Mb CF cards are pretty cheap, and you end up with a highly satisfactory poor man's solid state drive.
> your students can get cards in a range of capacities, from one or two megabytes to 500+.
The current range of CF card capacities is, to my knowledge, 8Mb (cheap, but not per megabyte) to 196Mb (stupidly expensive, but much cheaper per megabyte than the little cards). The fatter CF Type 2 cards hold more; the IBM MicroDrives [ibm.com] are Type 2.
> Zip disks suck! They often lock up and won't read
Sez you :-P. In my experience, Zip disks treated with only a small amount of respect are the most reliable removable read/write devices I've seen. That doesn't make them bulletproof, and they will die in time, but for the money they're superb, if you ask me.
If students don't understand basic backup rules, though, no format will be adequate. They'll kill or lose the media, or they'll thork their own files and not have a copy, et cetera.