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It's too late to say goodbye to Floppy Disk Drives

The Floppy Disk Drive - that small box which hangs in mid-air on your desktop PC's cabinet's front. Do you ever look at it? With a majestic CD-RW or DVD+/-RW sitting on the apogee of the cabinet, the floppy drive is only an antique showcase piece of your PC. Litting up only when your PC boots up, and probably when the mouse click falls on the unfortunate '3½" Floppy Disk (A:)' icon in My Computer, the floppy disk drive is the most forgotten device of the desktop PC.

If the floppy disks are already nailed to the graves and wiped out from the face of the earth (most of it, that is), why are even the latest PCs fixed with floppy disk drives. I thank God that my laptop does not have a floppy drive. It's a complete waste of space especially for a thing like a notebook.

Let's see why floppies became obsolete so fast.

They were not reliable. Everytime you touched a floppy, there was that big red sign flashing in front of your eyes: HANDLE WITH CARE. One slight jerk, or just a peak into the inside of the disk could render it permanently unusable. Not so to CDs n DVDs. Toss them about, play frisbee, use them as saucers, you can still watch your movies or load your software from them.

The space offered by a floppy is tinier than tiny for today's world. Just like 5$ was a really huge sum back in the days of my grandpa, 1.44 MB was a huge space when the floppies were invented. The first computers that ran on stored data, ran on floppies, not hard disks. Now there are 360 GB hard disks (1 GB = 1024 MB) and soon there will be 1TB hard disk (= 1024 GB). And the CDs offer 650 and 700 MB storage, the DVD, more than 4 GB on one side. Who would go for floppies now?

It's already too late to say goodbye to the floppy disk drives. Those magnetic storage tapes got obsolete. VHS tapes gave way for VCDs. Why are the floppy disk drives still suffering in the stampedes of long-running CD/DVD drives?

It's time for the PC manufacturers to rethink their PC designs and completely remove the floppy disk drive from the specifications and get the cost reduced (although the reduction would not be obvious due to its near-free cost).

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