Poll of the Day > Why did floppy disks stop at 1.44 MB?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I always thought they were overrated, personally. But I noticed PC manufacturers like Dell were still including floppy drives as late as 2007, if not later. With flash drives and even CD-RW on the scene, it seemed ridiculous.

They didn't. Iomega had decent success with their Zip and Jazz drives. There were also the Castlewood Orb drives, larger and faster than the Iomegas but had reliability issues.

SuperDisk was also around for a while, and the drives were backward compatible with standard floppies.

I remember reading about Zip drives, but for some reason they never caught on to the old floppy's ubiquity.

Well, mostly it's because, as you stated, other technologies were rapidly developing that were simply cheaper, faster and more easily used especially with regard to USB drives and CDs.

I had a few Zip drives, actually wanted an Orb drive but never managed to get one. They were pretty great at a time when CD writers were actually still prohibitively expensive. Iomega attempted to stay in the market later on pushing their branded external CD writers, but I think they tried too long to hold on to their magnetic media niche and IIRC were absorbed by Lenovo about 5 years ago.

Red_Frog posted...

USB drives

Floppy disks were long gone by time USB sticks were a thing.

CDs ware what killed the floppy
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I think it had something with Drive A having the highest boot priority or something, and USB booting wasn't really possible for a while for reasons I can't remember.

The 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies were just one of many floppy variants.
IBM released multiple 8" floppies in different sizes, 80 KB, 242 KB, 284 KB, 303 KB, 492 KB, 568 KB, 985 KB, 1,136 KB and 1,212 KB.
And it existed multiple more standards in different sizes.
But if we skip those, the 5.25" ones, the 2" ones, the 3" ones (yes, we had 3" as well) and the 3.5" that had a lower storage size (like 720 KB), then we got...
Mitsumi Quick Disk: 1987 - 1.44 MB
1987 - 2.88 MB
2TD drive in NEC PC-88: 1988 - 9.3 MB
Flextra BR3020: 1990 - 21.4 MB
Floptical: 1990 - 21 MB
Flextra BR3225: 1992 - 50 MB
LS-120: 1996 - 120.375 MB
UHD144: 1997/1998 - 144 MB
HiFD 150: 1998 - 150 MB
HiFD 200: 1999 - 200 MB
LS-240: 2000/2001 - 240.75 MB

And then I probably missed a couple of them.
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Ogurisama posted...

Red_Frog posted...

USB drives

Floppy disks were long gone by time USB sticks were a thing.

Que? No they weren't, and what an incredibly silly assertion. USB sticks became a thing right around the turn of the century, they coexisted for quite some time. The thing that truly ended the floppy reign was UEFI, firmware updates no longer fit on them and for the most part were safely flashable either from within the OS itself or copied to a nonvolatile space for updating during a reboot.

I still work on computers that have 3.5" drives. the only thing I've used them for in the last 5-10 years is to run memtest86. computers don't tend to come with the drives anymore though, and I'm not sure but probably there isn't even a floppy controller on most motherboards any more.
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