I still have a machine with a "Floptical" drive in it! If your not familiar with them, floptical drives are magnetic media based but the substrate that the metal oxide is adhered to is semi-transparent so that a laser can line up the tracks while formatting/reading/writing to the disk. That allows for a much higher data density (20 MB per disk).

My second floptical drive sits on the shelf though, and I have not used the first in several years now. Even though these are SCSI devices and perform at 4X (over a normal floppy drive's speed), it still takes about 20 mins. to write a 10MB file out to one. I can burn a CD with the same file in about 4 mins.!!

They were pretty cool in one respect though; they have a powered ejection device for ejecting the disk (like a Mac)!<g>

Marty

I don't own any machines (including my server) that have a floppy drives, and the server is 5 years old <g>...

If need something like this and there's no USB handy, a CR-RW usually does the trick...

You can't fit anything onto a floppy <g>...

+++ Rick ---

Yeah, for servers I agree. Also handy for quick backup/offloading of private keys, certificates, etc.

But for laptops/workstations (what Doug is getting), I haven't needed a floppy once in 3+ years now.

Floppy disk? You're really dating yourself there. <bg>

They can occasionally be useful. Just changed a client's server over to a new machine, ransferring data, etc, etc. Had added the floppy drive to the new server just in case. Found out yesterday that one small peice of data had been missed in the transfer, the old server is no longer on the network, and doesn't have USB / CD-RW. It did have a floppy drive, so all very quickly sorted out (once we found some floppy disks :-))

Kevin

Custom Softworks

---