Ask HN: What alternatives to floppy disks exist? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to floppy disks exist?

#11

Post by xavel » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:16 PM UTC

osivertsson wrote: post #8

xavel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can you elaborate on why you feel a need for such physical media? Maybe it's not perceived the same way in the USA, but in Europe, most people who use cloud-services find it increasingly difficult to trust american cloud-services, thanks to the NSA. Hence why I'm looking for alternative ways to share sensitive information, programs, documents, you name it. There's of course also owncloud, which is nice enough, but l…

I'm in Europe (Sweden), and while a lot of people on HN and in the tech community care, most other people I know here just don't have this on their top 100 list of things they worry about. That said, I agree that sensitive or not, we really shouldn't be sharing everything over only a handful of communication channels (typically home & work broadband connection + mobile phone data connection). It makes surveillance al…

I'm from Germany, so I see what you mean -- in Europe, especially central and northern europe, there's hardly any need to share files physically. But alternatives are necessary in times like these, which is why I'm glad things like P2P-services exist.

I guess you could say I'm merely planning for the future. Not that I wish that I'd ever actually have to go about sharing data via physical mediums, but I wouldn't exactly bet on it.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to floppy disks exist?

#12

Post by dangrossman » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:18 PM UTC

xavel wrote: post #7

zellio wrote: post #3

You can purchase USB keys in bulk for around 1.50 U$D. How is this not a viable solution? Floppy disks today seem to cost only about half that price.

1.50$ for an entire pack of USB sticks? Where did you find such an offer? Because according to amazon, the cheapest they have are a pack of 10 USB sticks, 1GB, for 39$: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E3MII96/ Not exactly cheap, if you ask me. Not exactly super-expensive either, of course, but definitely not cheap. And I think the reasons the price for floppy disks doesn't seem to go down is because only certain people s…

Amazon is virtually never the best price on items eBay, Alibaba, or contacting the wholesale division of any of the stores you get searching "bulk flash drive" on Google would be a better idea. They start around $2.50/drive retail with your logo custom printed, so you can do much better wholesale.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to floppy disks exist?

#13

Post by FurrBall » Fri, Sep 13, 2013, 2:05 PM UTC

tjr wrote: post #2

This looks like a possibility: http://www.amazon.com/4GB-Metal-Key-Flash-Drive/dp/B005OP2JQ... I honestly do not remember how much floppy disks used to cost; it's been... probably over a decade since I bought one. But $1.26 seems pretty reasonable for such a use.

7 bucks shipped. And you can't save on shipping with a batch order. Not as disposable as a floppy but getting close.

I foresee the day we can buy $1 flash drives at the local dollar store. Relative to inflation.

Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to floppy disks exist?

#14

Post by gboone42 » Fri, Sep 13, 2013, 6:56 PM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #9

tjr wrote: post #2

This looks like a possibility: http://www.amazon.com/4GB-Metal-Key-Flash-Drive/dp/B005OP2JQ... I honestly do not remember how much floppy disks used to cost; it's been... probably over a decade since I bought one. But $1.26 seems pretty reasonable for such a use.

That's not $1.26, that's about $5. The actual postage to ship something that small would be $1-2, but they're charging $5, which means the shipping cost is really just a way to make the purchase price look smaller.

Given that a 4GB USB key holds roughly 2844x more data than your average floppy disk, I'd say $5 is a steal!