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Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

popularmechanics.com

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Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#11

Post by Sanddancer »

AgentME wrote: post #2

Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.

They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc -- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to two megs, and others not able to handle much more than 1.44mb.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#12

Post by ars »

AgentME wrote: post #2

Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.

> Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb?

The second. With a better read/write head you could store more data on them (for example 2.88mb was available).

But the physical media of the disk may or may not have the necessary resolution.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#13

Post by josteink »

dcw303 wrote: post #3

If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.

> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions.

To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply already committed so there was no need to have any additional layers of security.

The difference between then and now is that new computers have enormous amounts of memory and use it to provide write-back caching. This means the OS can tell applications that data is committed when it's not. This is an OS level decision which is done for performance and has nothing to do with the physical eject-buttons on your devices.

You may call this a small nit, but I think it's an important one. The eject-button on old machines would suffer the exact same problems if it used an OS which offered write-back cache.

You could say old Macs didn't have this problem, which is true. But it didn't have an eject-button. It relied on the OS doing that. And then instead you had the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it (or that users didn't realize they had to drag the disk-icon to trash).

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#14

Post by ars »

Sanddancer wrote: post #11
AgentME wrote: post #2

Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.

They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc -- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to two megs, and others not able to han…

> They advertise their size.

Everything is under the control of the drive, not the media.

They advertise their size as in: tell the drive what to expect. But the drive is in full control of where to write on the disk, and how densely.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#15

Post by sdoering »

esaym wrote: post #8

Ah, disappointing. I was expecting some giant array of them all running in unison and making beautiful "music". Sorta like the radiohead hardware hobbyist video https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ

Why is it disappointing content, when only your subjective expectations were not met?

What is it that makes this the OC's fault? Or am I not getting something here?

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#18

Post by rahimnathwani »

Sanddancer wrote: post #11
AgentME wrote: post #2

Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.

They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc -- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to two megs, and others not able to han…

"and others not able to handle much more than 1.44mb"

My first experience installing Linux was using a bunch of disks which were unable to handle even 1.44MB (even though they were sold as 2HD). I couldn't tell, of course, and I had no idea why my install kept on failing or generating errors part way through the installation process :(

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#19

Post by ossreality »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #4
dcw303 wrote: post #3

If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.

What a great point. I am so paranoid now about removing USB drives after I accidentally removed one while it was still writing to the drive (which I had no idea because there was no LED on the drive) and it bricked the entire device. I generally wait until my computer has shutdown completely now before removing any important drives, just to be sure.

lol, push eject, wait a few seconds for the notification, remove device.

oh right, you're probably using windows.

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