3.5" discs

WetGeek

I can't remember who it was who asked whether Solus supports 3.5" "floppy" drives, but it got me curious. I happened to have an external HP floppy drive, and plenty of Solus installations, so I found one of my old discs and gave it a try.

The disc was from about 30 years ago, when I was teaching C programming at Microsoft to business programmers who were more used to COBOL, but were planning to develop Windows software.

It probably only worked because this was an external (USB) drive, but for anyone with a real need to work with these discs it offers the possibility. Such a drive is only about $20 US.

dbarron

I can hardly imagine that's more than a fringe interest. When almost no data (by today's standards) will even fit on floppy.

WetGeek

dbarron
Obviously, you're someone who doesn't need to know this.

Someone who may need to recover historical data that only exists on 3.5" floppy discs may have very different requirements than you do. And might be glad to know that there are cheap external drives that will allow them to read those discs on a modern computer running Solus.

dbarron

That's true...but with my own experience with floppies (even when CDs were the thing), most floppies that old had perished to unrecoverable status by now. Heck, last time I tried an archival CD, it had failed. Admittedly, not the best storage conditions...but these medias are definitely finite.

WetGeek

dbarron most floppies that old had perished to unrecoverable status by now

I don't know about most floppies, but the one I just tested was 30 years old, and I could read from and write to it without a problem. USB drives to accommodate these discs would not be readily available if nobody ever needed to access a floppy drive.

I originally bought it because I needed it at work, but at home I found it useful for copying old photos to my NAS. (For many years Kodak and other labs provided floppies in addition to, or instead of snapshots.)

Bouquins

Call me an idiot, but I wouldn't throw those old floppy disks to the trashbin too soon. I am much more confident in data duration on a mechanical hard drive than a SSD.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hp-warns-that-some-ssd-drives-will-fail-at-32-768-hours-of-use/

synth-ruiner

Bouquins that article is about a flaw in a specific range of models of SCSI SSD, not all SSDs generally. I agree that SSDs may have shorter lifetimes than magnetic hard disks, but what does this have to do with floppy disks anyway?

Justin

Bouquins That article is a software issue which was promptly fixed.

I'd trust SSDs FAR more than a HDD, especially if the HDD isn't stored in a shielded container. Magnetic bursts hit Earth from the solar system occasionally and can wipe bits off disks.

Bouquins

synth-ruiner but what does this have to do with floppy disks anyway?

It has to do, IMHO, with the fact that older technologies may not be useless, and newer aren't always the best. No more, no less.

dbarron

That's true...the best strategy so far is cloud backup as far as I can tell, and probably best to use 2 or more to preserve files best. No physical strategy seems that great to me (sadly).

brent

Used 3.5's in my early days. Think I'd love to see some of my own writing today...but these things held about 10 word docs!
What you are looking for as far as I can tell, in theory, is a "bridge" from drive to scuzzy to GUI. I'll bet there is some 3rd party/FOSS stuff out there. Sorry I can't point you in the right direction.

What I thought was more reliable and totally bitchin were ZIP drives. Used them a lot, was always impressed.

Bouquins

Justin I'd trust SSDs FAR more than a HDD, especially if the HDD isn't stored in a shielded container. Magnetic bursts hit Earth from the solar system occasionally and can wipe bits off disks.

Each an everyone think different 😀 My purpose wasn't to initiate a discussion about SSDs versus HDDs, but I think that we know by the time elapsed using HDDs, that is to say, tenths of years, how reliable they are. When we use SSDs for such a long time, we can tell if SSDs are as reliable as the HHDs. Just my humble opinion. That said, all my computers run with an SSD, but they only contain the system; no sensible data.