Computer Hardware

Sony Ejecting The 1.44MB Floppy After 30 Years

Sony announced today that they plan on halting production of the venerable 3.5″ floppy disk by early next year. It’s understandable, afterall. I mean, when was the last time you actually bought a box of 1.44MB disks? Can’t remember if it was even this century? The truth is once CD and DVD writers started showing up on PCs as standard drives, the floppy’s day was numbered. Flash technology didn’t help the matter either. Many PC makers haven’t even put the drive on new computers for several years now. So here’s a suggestion, if you think you’re going to want to keep any of those files you stored on those floppies 10 years ago you might want to consider doing one of 2 things. First, make sure you have an external floppy drive if you plan on keeping the discs so you can access them in the future. Second, just transfer the files onto your Flash drive now. It won’t matter if you have the external drive then. Chances are the data is nothing but icon or text files anyway. 1.44Mb is really a whole bunch of small if you think about it. So adios and thanks my little floppy disk. You sure helped me get data from one place to another when laptops were the size of a suitcase!

Sony To End Floppy Disk Production

by Martyn Williams, IDG News Service, April 26, 2010

“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 17TB of data, enough to fill about 700 single-sided Blu-ray discs.”