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02/13/02
Why Do We Still Have Floppy Disk Drives?
by Jake Davenport
About two months ago, the PC that I use for the bulk of my development work began to behave strangely. Within days the wretched thing crashed completely, unable to boot, and I struggled valiantly for hours on end to get it operational. After a week of tilting windmills — installing and re-installing the operating system, restoring backups, wiping and re-configuring everything — the stinking machine continued to have problems of an unknown origin. As the days dragged on without significant gains, it became clear to me that I was throwing away more money in lost time and productivity than I would otherwise spend if I just bought a new computer. So I headed over to a local retail outlet with a good reputation and picked up one of their home-spun-brand PC’s.
Despite my resentment at purchasing it under duress, the new computer is pretty sweet: it’s a 1.7 gigahertz Pentium 4 with 512 megabytes of 133 megahertz SDRAM. It’s got a 40 gig ATA/100 hard drive and a 32 meg GeForce2 AGP video card. There’s a 4-channel audio card, a 10/100 Ethernet network card, and a 56K v.90 modem installed, 4 USB ports and your standard parallel/serial configuration. In addition, I went with a CD/CD-RW option so I can burn CD’s to my heart’s content. Strangely, though, even with all its top-of-the-line bells and whistles, the computer still came with a 3.5" floppy disk drive, the standard kind with a (pathetic by today’s standards) 1.44 megabyte storage capacity.
What, I wondered, is this puny and archaic throwback to the 1980’s doing on my brand new top-dollar super-duper PC? Hasn’t something better come along?
Many years ago, the 3.5" floppy disk drive was an upgrade from the 5.25" floppy disk drive, and a few years after that the capacity of both was increased with the introduction of high-density floppy disks. At some point, the 1.44 megabyte 3.5" floppy drive was developed and it rapidly became the industry standard. People were thrilled — at the time, you could get a ton of information on one of those things. Windows itself came on floppy disks, not more than ten of them if you can imagine that. The floppy drive made computing life portable, and that was to everyone’s benefit.
The demand for ever-larger storage, though, did not decrease. Every time some company made a larger hard drive or faster CD-ROM, the marketplace demanded more. Transfer speed — the speed at which information is read from the media and transferred into the computer’s RAM — was also a huge issue. What good was a big hard drive if it took forever to get a program to load from it? Demand, it seemed, would continue to push the industry to achieve larger capacity inside, smaller footprint outside, and faster speeds overall. But while hard drives, CD-ROMs, motherboards, RAM, video cards, sound cards, memory caches, network cards, and everything else under the PC hardware sun got bigger inside, smaller outside, and faster overall, non-proprietary innovation in the floppy disk arena simply died.
I say "non-proprietary" because plenty of innovation was being made by companies like Iomega. Iomega has reached name-recognition status as the creator of the now-ubiquitous Zip Drive — a misnomer if ever there was one. After all, there was nothing zippy about the first generations of Zip Drives — they were slow, klunky, and notoriously prone to failure. But the Zip Drive was not a replacement for the floppy disk nor did it come standard with every computer, and the disks used by one were not even remotely compatible with the other. Somehow, despite this lack of reliability or backward-compatibility, Iomega’s marketing machete cleaved a path through the consumer jungle and introduced an emerging mainstream marketplace to its entirely proprietary solution.
Now I don’t want to bash Iomega too badly, although I am certainly not a fan. I have owned several Zip Drives (several because they tend to fail after one or two years of frequent use) and I continue to recommend them to my clients when they’re searching for an "industry standard" portable storage solution because in the end the Zip Drive is the path of least resistance. That certainly doesn’t make it superior in quality or price — it just means the Iomega marketing team has been considerably more successful than any competitors, and therefore the Zip has become the de facto standard in most homes and offices.
Iomega certainly wasn’t the only company that devised alternatives to the floppy disk drive. SyQuest has put out a whole series of removable media drives over the years, but they have never caught on in the mainstream. Sony and other companies put forth a few half-hearted offerings, but nothing emerged as an industry standard and nothing has replaced the floppy.
The product closest to achieving that goal was the SuperDisk, created by Imation. The SuperDisk was faster than a conventional floppy drive, had disks with a 120 megabyte capacity (20 megs more than Iomega’s first Zip Drive), and was the size of a floppy disk drive. The hot fudge on the sundae, though, was that the SuperDisk was actually backward-compatible. In the SuperDisk drive you could use Imation’s proprietary SuperDisks or you could use standard 1.44 megabyte boring old floppies.
Of all the solutions offered to the marketplace, this was the one that I and many of my techie compadres believed would become the industry standard. We naively assumed that, because it was immediately and empirically better, it would depose the Zip Drive as the de facto standard and new computers would soon come off the assembly line with the SuperDisk already installed, a high-capacity and versatile replacement for the 3.5" floppy.
This, as it turns out, was dead wrong. In fact, what has happened since the SuperDisk was introduced over 5 years ago is that Iomega continues to dominate the add-on removable storage market, and new PC’s continue to get built with nearly-useless 1.44 meg floppy drives. SuperDisk technology continues to limp along, trying to compete in the same marketplace as the Zip Drive, even though it could certainly have replaced the floppy drive altogether had the fates conspired differently. Of the other contenders, none has stepped forward and successfully usurped that little slot on the front of the PC.
The demand hasn’t diminished any, but the lack of a reasonable and standardized replacement for the 3.5" floppy drive ensures that companies like Iomega can continue to rake in the dough. The lack of an emergent industry standard for removable media ensures that the other proprietary disk drive companies — the runner-ups in the contest for consumer dollars — can continue to squabble over what little market share Iomega hasn’t yet won. The geeks who actually bought the "better" technology get to enjoy the benefits of their wisdom by sharing the media format of their choice with friends and family who followed along, leaving them closed off from rest of the world in proprietary isolation. (Remember beta versus VHS?)
It may be that the floppy disk is a goner — perhaps there will be no next-generation industry standard. People who use computers seem to prefer CD’s, and the CD industry has taken off like a super-sonic fighter jet. Blank CD’s are cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to buy, and entirely omnipresent when compared with the proprietary disk solutions like Zip. Everyone’s got a CD drive, and just about every CD drive can read a disk burned on a CD-RW. Nowadays, most computers allow you to boot directly from the CD, eliminating the only other argument I can think of for retaining the floppy drive. Best of all, CD’s really aren’t proprietary.
Unfortunately, you still can’t use a CD-RW like you can a removable drive. Copying files to and from a CD, and removing files in particular, can be difficult if not downright daunting. Windows XP appears to have integrated these features better than any previous version of Windows, but the ease of sliding a floppy disk in, copying a file, and taking the floppy disk out has yet to be emulated by CD-RW's. Until that functional gap is filled, the Iomegas of the world will continue to have their niche and eat it, too.
It isn’t really sad to contemplate the death of the floppy drive, but it’s frustrating to be continually confronted with its uselessness. It’s even more frustrating to have to pay extra to choose a proprietary solution like Zip or SuperDisk when these solutions only create compatibility problems and serve the short-term. When the floppy drive is finally gone, no one will really miss it but we may ever wonder why something better never came along...
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