[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 03:21:23AM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> ObOpinion:
> I still think the industry should have ditched the 3.5" 2MB floppy in
> favor of Zip or LS120 six or seven years ago.  2MB floppies -- 1.44MB

I have wanted floppies replaced too, but I found Zip to be unreliable,
and LS-120 was horribly slow.

I ended up buying several spare Zip100 drives, and I'm down to my last
two spares.  The current pair of Zip drives I have running seem OK for
now, but some of them lasted only a few months.

When I last worked for a company with tons of Zip drives, the dead
drives were dumped by the box-load every month.

Jaz was a little better, but the media price never did come down.

I really thought by now we'd have replaced the floppy with something
better.

I don't really like CD-R/RW because you have to "burn" them, and the
packet writing stuff never seems to work well, and isn't really
available for UNIX systems.

The MO stuff was pretty nice, but seems dead now, and never got really
cheap.

LS120... they felt awfully slow to me.

> death" problem.)  But now, I think the time for even that is past.  The
> useful-size window of removable media has left both of them standing on
> the sidelines.

I don't think any truly good floppy replacement has been offered by the
industry.  Nothing so far fills the needs that I see:

* cheap
* writable without burning, and very high rewrite limits
* reliable
* reasonably fast, though I don't care if they can run apps... just
  1MB/sec would be fine and probably doable on the cheap.
* platform-neutral hardware (ubiquitous)
* a platform-neutral filesystem would be ideal
* the ability to use it as a pure block device

Nothing right now fits the bill.  If Zip had been reliable, it could
have made it for awhile, but that's all history now.


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