The Death of the floppy what about MiniDisk

[gilf]

I was just reading an article on the BBC website about those new keyring USB drives and they were also talking about the fact that the floppy drive now seems to be on its way out. Why has minidisk never been used as a PC media format, I think it does some tricky stuff with the music were if 2 sounds are at the same tone and level its blanks one out to save space. Anyway why hasnt a large capacity disk been used as a standard, I know Sony have a 100Mb floppy why didnt that catch on. CD buring can be a pain.

[j2buttonsw]

Here's my 2d: I don't mind admitting that I hate floppy disks with a passion: they are small, tiresome and very very unreliable. However, since nearly all PCs are able to boot from them they still have a use. Unfortunately, very few computers can boot from a USB device. The problem with minidiscs is that is is not an "open" format; In other words every time you want to use the minidisc technology you have to pay someone (Sony, I think). This is not true for other formats such as CD, USB or, indeed, floppy drives. I have never seen a PC minidisc drive and will probably never will as the capacity is equivalent to a CD and is restricted to music data. The future is DVD where you can save GBs not MBs of data.

[Phantaxus]

I have a 64mb usb keyring drive and its great. I did see a technical specification on the web for a minidisc drive for pc use - its on the web somewhere but I dont know where maybe another AB user can find it... I think MD didnt take off on computer as by the time they were thinking about releasing it cd had already become established.

[gilf]

Yeah I understand all of this. however CD and I would imagine DVD 1. takes ages to copy to and 2. to a large extent is a one time copy only (yeah OK you can get rewritables but they cost more). The thing with MD is that you can copy on to it loads of times. I do accept that its a closed format, Its just that its very, portable has a fairly large capacity and its rewritable. I honestly believe there is a market for a medium storage device such as this. We use NT at work and being an I.T. consultant and visited many sites I know many other do too and you can use USB on NT.

[lisaj]

Sony did develop the DataMD, but it never caught on. They released it initially in Japan and a few did hit the streets but it was just after Iomega had released the ZIP drive and had caught the market. Sony decided that it wasn't going to compete effectively because it was only 64Mb (versus 100Mb for the Zip)... It was however smaller, faster and cheaper (I think they were idiots cause the ZIP drive was carp).
Now, what I don't understand is why we're not all using SmartMedia as floppy replacements. A 128Mb card is the size of stamp, you can fit ten of them in your wallet, they're fast (1Mb/s) and they can cost less than floppies per Mb... I just don't understand!

Now, with respect to CD-Rs, they cost 10p each, a 48x burner can polish one off in three minutes and they hold up to 900Mb. They're also resilient and long-lasting. In a word, economically unbeatable (which is why the Iomega Zip750 will crash a burn a very quick death)

[lisaj]

gilf: er.... NT doesn't have native USB support? This makes it fairly useless if carrying around a USB drive is your aim. What use is a drive that requires a separate disk with drivers on it??

The floppy hasn't died simply because you don't need to install a driver to make it work, the BIOS gets it going on the off. For any other medium to take off, you're gonna need unilateral BIOS support, and until you can boot an OS off a USB pendrive (or a minidisc), it simply won't replace the good ol' floppy.

[gilf]

LisaJ, sorry missed out the "T" on cant support USB and that was the point I was making. Those handy little USB things are useless on NT. I know why the floppy died simply because its capacity is too small compared with todays current file sizes. We dont deal in ASCII text files anymore its all MP3's and MB's of data rather than Kb. I have nothing against CD's as I have many of them collecting dust on my desk because after a few days the data is out of date and become nothing more than coffee cup stands. I guess I need a faster writer.

[honkytonkman]

Just to add my two pennyworth, for the last few years new Apple Macintosh computer haven't even been fitted with a floppy drive. The idea being that most tiny files will be emailed and for the other reasons given here.