71–80 of 102 posts
Although this is a fun idea, it's just putting an SD card into a 3.5" floppy disk case and then wiring up the read/write head with contacts to make it appear like an insertion of a normal mass storage SD card. A more accurate title would be "putting an SD card in a floppy disk case"
Makes me ponder a 3.5" SD reader with a eject button though.
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> 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…
> 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…
* Drag the disc icon to the trash can to eject the disc.
* Pull the power cord since there were no other way they knew of to turn it off.
Mac's reputation as a usable computer was severely impacted, needless to say :).
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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…
Exactly, it reminds me of the time when I formatted a HD 3.5" floppy to 2M with the aforementioned excellent 2M3.0 tool by Ciriaco García de Celis (Facultad de Ciencias de Valladolid: Grupo Universitario de Informatica). It provided 500 Kb of more available data beyond the 1.44M (more then fdformat). From a 2M dos bootdisk I launched a stripped version of win3.1, extracted the WIN3.UC2 archive to a ramdrive of 6M or…
It's slightly amusing to me that floppy disks were once called "HD", even though the abbreviation stood for high density rather than high definition.
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.
I really wish there had been a bigger push towards some kind of standardized packet writing for DVDRW (CDRW had this issue with a one use calibration track), so that they could behave more like floppies (drag and drop file transfers etc). The media itself is fully passive, while a SD card or thumbdrive have logic sitting between the USB interface and the raw flash. Thus optical media can be "rescued" by simply gettin…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier_%28packet_writin...
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.
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Good catch! I had completely forgotten about that one. For those completely oblivious to this: This was actually not about getting data written to disk, but to physically protect the drive from its own mechanical construction. The "park" command would cause the harddrive to move its magnetic read and write-heads away from the internal platters, so that when it was powered down and the disks stopped spinning, the plat…
I still type "sync;sync;sync" before I unmount something. (This used to be how you'd tell the tape-spooler to rewind..)
Always, always sync -r after writing to a zip drive on Windows. Even minutes after you think it is finished writing, do not trust the OS to have finished flushing to disk.
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Exactly, it reminds me of the time when I formatted a HD 3.5" floppy to 2M with the aforementioned excellent 2M3.0 tool by Ciriaco García de Celis (Facultad de Ciencias de Valladolid: Grupo Universitario de Informatica). It provided 500 Kb of more available data beyond the 1.44M (more then fdformat). From a 2M dos bootdisk I launched a stripped version of win3.1, extracted the WIN3.UC2 archive to a ramdrive of 6M or…
> HD 3.5" floppy It's slightly amusing to me that floppy disks were once called "HD", even though the abbreviation stood for high density rather than high definition.
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It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media. As far as I know this has never been enabled by default.
> It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media. No, it's always required, because applications may be writing to the drive.