Finally the end of Floppy disks?

For years we have all been thinking the floppy disk will surely come to an end soon... well now it finally looks like it could be true.

Originally Posted by :
Sony to End Floppy Disk production

The floppy disk, already abandoned by most computer users, has been pushed closer to extinction by a Sony decision to end manufacturing of the storage media this early next year.

Sony, one of a handful of companies that still sells floppy disk media in Japan, will end sales of floppy disks by March 2011 due to dwindling demand.

The Japanese domestic floppy disk market amounted to about 12 million disks last year, of which Sony had a 70 percent share, it said. A 10-pack of Sony 3.5-inch floppy disks costs ¥570 (US$6) at a central Tokyo electronics store.

Many of the remaining customers are legacy equipment users in the education and research sectors, said Sony.

Demand for the disks peaked in the mid-nineties when the most popular type of floppy, the "HD" disk, offered 1.44MB of storage space, but it began to fall in the latter part of the nineties when the more durable and higher capacity CD-R and CD-RW formats reached the mass market. In contrast to the small capacity of the floppy disk, a CD could hold 650MB so offered obvious benefits to users. In recent years USB memory sticks have become popular for transporting data between computers.

To put the floppy market in perspective, consider those 12 million disks sold in Japan last year. Together they can hold about 17GB of data, which isn't even enough to fill a single-sided Blu-ray Disc.

Source: by Martyn Williams, IDG News

According to these figures, other makers only sold 5 million disks last year. So wit Sony having now ended production of floppy disks last month, these remaining makers will need to fill the gap, if they can. We might even see some Chinese makers entering this market to offer a continued source of floppy disks.

One thing is certain, all retro fans that use floppy disks for their storage will now face a much harder time sourcing disks. Time to consider alternatives and the end to using them? Maybe, as alternatives do exist, such as floppy drive emulators, which go in place of a real drive, load disk images from SD card and emulate the image as a disk to the system. The other alternatives are things like WHDLoad, which remove the need completely.

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I will cry the day they end production...
Floppy was like an icon to our generation. That square plastic thing, that make a so cool sound...
someone write here about the feeling of opening a new box of disks, and write and glue new labels on them....

don't know why, but CDs/DVDs dont give me that feeling.
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If this is the death of the floppy disk, it will be its third death.

It died a couple of years ago when someone (Sony I think) stopped selling/manufacturing them somewhere.

It also died a few years back when PC World stopped selling them.

So, I expect it has a few lives left yet.
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Originally Posted by Tiago:
I will cry the day they end production...
Floppy was like an icon to our generation. That square plastic thing, that make a so cool sound...
someone write here about the feeling of opening a new box of disks, and write and glue new labels on them....
don't know why, but CDs/DVDs dont give me that feeling.

You're right, floppies did have that nice tactile feeling. I found the same with minidisc compared to CD. I think things that have a 'cartridge' like feel and can be handled easily and somewhat less carefully are just more pleasing to hold, and the positive action of inserting it firmly into the slot is a better feeling than placing a disc in a tray (not, that's not meant to be smutty but it might come across that way).
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