So cool! Love the retro storage coasters.
I really really really really hope no one has a floppy disk with important data on it these days.
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Like the US DoD?
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Donāt get me startedā¦ 
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I believe the nuclear arsenal is supposed to switch from 8" floppy to SD card later this year. Iām not sure if anything else is still using them.
I remember when I was in college there were some satellite uplink stations on 8" floppy that were looking into floppy emulators due to the difficulty in procuring media as well as the problem of failing drives. One of my professors had been tangentially involved in something related to that. (I heard some stories about how lucky theyād been at one point to find a warehouse full of the correct variant of 8" floppy disks at sone point.)
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I think I would trust an 8" floppy to hold the data longer than an SD card. I have had some for 33 years and they still read correctly.
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Yes, but where do you buy new ones? And where do you buy new drives? Have you used an 8" floppy drive daily for 33 years and had it still work? Drive mechanisms certainly wear out. (Also: why do you have 8" floppies? 5.25" floppies were common consumer gear, but 8"?)
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Had 8" for my first consumer personal computer. Canāt remember which one. Might have been a Trash-80 or a Zenith Z100. Kind of had everything at one point.
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Just recently discovered that I had a Jump Drive that somehow ādevelopedā about 12 partitions. It was a 15GB Jump Drive and each partition had its own overhead, so by the time you got to āfreeā space per partition, I was under 1GB per partition. I had to go in, delete all the partitions, and reformat the drive. No idea if anything had been on it before, but itās no longer there now.
Floppy discs have been much more reliable in my experience, you just have to find a drive that works.
I would have thought the MOD would be able to commission new disks and drives to be made. They are quite simple and low tech being so old.
When I first started work as a programmer in 1983 we used Motorola development workstations that had a 6800 CPU and two 8" drives. About a year later we move to a PDP11 73 which had an 8" floppy.
I built my own Z80 base system with dual 8" floppies at home. I designed the floppy controller, which was multiple chips in those days and wrote my own disk operating system.
I bought the drives second hand and had to repair one of them. It was all through hole discreet logic and op amps, etc. Very easy to understand and repair.
I kept the PDP11 at home until the beginning of this year when I gave it to an enthusiast who came to collect it from Germany. He reported all the original installation disks were still readable. You can see the machine here: http://hydraraptor.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tektronix-8560-still-going-strong.html
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I believe the DoD did reopen an old floppy disk factory to do a big run of disks at one point ~10 years ago. But that kind of thing is expensive. Switching to modern technology is cheaper and allows them to have multiple suppliers, which is important for multiple reasons.
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Yes but modern technology is less reliable. When 8" disk drives were designed they were designed for reliability, not price because they were specialist equipment. They cost several hundred dollars and were built to last. The PDP11 cost the company I worked for Ā£48,000, substantially more than my first house and it still works fine 33 years later. SD cards are mass produced consumer parts that cram in as many bits into as small a space as cheaply as possible. I would not trust them to control a nuclear arsenal and I am sure they would not store data for 33 years.
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Somehow I imagine that Defense Dept. sd cards would not be cheap mass-produced consumer items.
They would be staggeringly expensive mass-produced consumer items.
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Most often in dod or aviation (double if both) things are cheap consumer products that have 28 pages of testing and certification rendering them expense.
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There is also something to be said for the ability to steal and utilize said DoD items. Iād think the sale of such drives(were there any usb versions made?) and the IDE motherboard, CPU, and old enough OS to run it all may prove fairly easy for one of the governmental arms to track down.
Funny, I just did a tiny little project for a custom plane-builder, who was previously a customer of my former neighbor. I charged him the same as I would charge anyone else for something that size.
When I mentioned it to my former neighbor, he said āOh, the plane guys. Charge them 4x.ā
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In more ways than one. Ya know how many viruses can work on an 8" floppy based drive? yeah, noneā¦
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Yeah, theyāre used to paying it. I have a friend who just put his Mooney in for itās annual. And I thought mooring a boat was expensive.
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