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Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

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Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#81

Post by Crespyl »

pvdebbe wrote: post #57

I would like to see the 3.5" floppy do a comeback, for instance as a 1TB+ flash drive. It is large enough that you can comfortably handle it physically and label it, maybe it could be a small throwback to the age of floppies and zip drives.

At that size you could even get fancy and throw in an e-ink re-writable label, which could be used for anything from archive manifests to album art. No need for power on the disk, since that can be provided by the drive during write.

I love that we can fit tens of GB in a space the size of a fingernail, but it does get rather fiddly to pass around. USB thumbdrives are nice, but are thick enough that they don't really stack up well, or fit into folders and binders nicely.

The 3.5" form factor really is kind of a sweet spot for more than just nostalgia, IMO.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#82

Post by esaym »

OneOneOneOne wrote: post #59
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

That would be about 80E3 floppys. Assuming a transfer rate of 500kbyte/second the peak data rate for the array would be 40E9 byte/second!

Yes, that is what I wanting to see. Something impressive :)

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#83

Post by shdon »

soylentcola wrote: post #65
ttctciyf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac. I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that…

One of the things that drove me nuts using the earlier Macs at my college was the lack of an eject button. Sure, I understand the reasoning now, but when some crappy Hypercard project I was bungling made the computer freeze, I had no way to remove the floppy short of rebooting the whole computer and waiting or hunting around for a paperclip to push into the little manual eject hole. Still, seeing how many people in m…

That latter bit is actually so common that Windows was changed to accommodate it, as Raymond Chen wrote at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031216-00/?p=...

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#84

Post by reconbot »

addled wrote: post #78

I was struck by a talk by Kirk Knoernschild in 2013 where he pointed out that there is now a generation of users who don't know what a floppy disk is... Yet it is still the "save" icon in nearly every application.

"What's a pay phone?" is a phrase you'll hear from time to time too.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#85

Post by Tloewald »

josteink wrote: post #13
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 a…

You could select the disk and then "Eject". Dragging to the trash was a shortcut to unmount and eject.

As for Macs not having the problem, this doesn't require qualification. Not only did Macs not have the problem, they treated disks as logical _volumes_ rather than physical devices. If you ejected a disk mid-save on a Mac it would complain, and if you inserted the wrong disk it would reject it and ask for the right one. If you did the same thing on a DOS/Windows machine it would correct the new disk (and leave the old disk corrupted too).

Similarly, you could copy files from one disk to another without having two disk drives in Finder (it was a pain in the neck, swapping the disks, but it worked). Other computers needed special software and relied on the user to insert the correct disk.

This advantage continues to this day. Windows still refers to devices by physical location.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#86

Post by putterson »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #62
mike_hock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also had that fixed with CDs/DVDs when the OS could lock the drive and handle the eject button any way it liked. I didn't quite like the way Linux handled this though, not allowing the disk to be ejected as long as any file descriptors were still open, which meant you had to hunt down the processes keeping them open. But it would be extremely helpful for writable media like flash to be able to do full write-back c…

Ooh, it'd be cool if you could do the same thing for USB drives. Perhaps some sort of claw or magnetic mechanism could hold the drive in place.

This makes me wonder what those two holes in the shroud of USB A style connectors are for. After a bit of googling it looks as if they are to provide a bit of tension against removal. I'm sure you could repurpose them to lock the usb drive into a USB port.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#87

Post by [deleted] »

josteink wrote: post #13
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 a…

[deleted]

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#88

Post by nci0808 »

addled wrote: post #78

I was struck by a talk by Kirk Knoernschild in 2013 where he pointed out that there is now a generation of users who don't know what a floppy disk is... Yet it is still the "save" icon in nearly every application.

2+ generations that have never tuned in a radio station using a radio button

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#89

Post by digi_owl »

delinka wrote: post #71
digi_owl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me ponder a 3.5" SD reader with a eject button though.

Or maybe a 3.5" SD card filled with SD technology ... I wonder how much storage that would be.

On that note, while idly looking into SD readers for the 3.5" bay, i came across one that could dock a 2.5" SATA drive.

http://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail...

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#90

Post by digi_owl »

agumonkey wrote: post #48
digi_owl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also had Sony's Minidisc that in the end could store 1GB in a physical format very similar to a floppy. This was magnet-optical based though, thus it involved having a laser heating the media before the magnetic arm could flip the bit.

The 1GB was later or implied compression IIUC. First models, in the floppy disk era, were 300-400MB. Still would have been a beautiful computer storage device, but Sony sonied.

True, they called it HiMD. The drives could also up-format the older MD disks to get a bit more storage.

That said, i think there was a version of the original MD format sold as a data drive in Japan. I think Sony had a model or two of their Vaio laptops with it built in.

That said, what basically sunk the format was slow write speed and that the Sony Music tail was basically wagging the Sony Electronics dog. The MD was from day one laden with DRM, and the HiMD took it even further (want to put those MP3s on there? Had to format convert to Atrac via some crazy program. And the only way to get them back out was via the analog hole).

This just at the time as large capacity flash was coming to market, and you could dump any random MP3 onto them with a drag and drop operation.

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