[PLUG] Floppy drives vs. USB keys.

[Elliott Mitchell]

>From: someone <plug_0 at robinson-west.com>
> Fine, but being superbly reliable isn't always the deciding factor.
> Show me a USB memory stick with 2 megs of capacity for 50 cents. 
> Try shredding a USB key.  Applications where a floppy disk and drive 

Okay, closest you're going to get is 32MB keys. If you buy them in bulk I
imagine you might be able to find them for $2.50 per. That is
significantly cheaper than the floppy drive and floppy (and a lot more
reliable).

If shredding for data destruction is key, then got for optical media. The
QC for them is starting to drop as well, but they've got a lot more space
and are more reliable than floppies at this point. I'll note that there
are paper shredders that are explicitly capable of shredding optical
media, but there aren't any that are capable of shredding floppies (the
metal would be a problem).

> are still attractive to me, running etherboot.  A bootrom that plugs
> into the network card is an ideal solution, but that is generally an
> expensive road to go down.  Unless you have PXE on an Intel mobo, it's
> pretty hard to add on-motherboard/on-nic chip based network booting for
> the cost of a floppy drive and a box of disks.

Haven't seen them advertised in large numbers, but if you're truely
dealing with that many, it shouldn't be a problem to get a batch of cards
which include ROMs. Small (spacewise) keyfob plus USB controller will be
cheaper than the floppy drive and floppies.

> USB flash memory devices do not work on old computers and some
> computers, such as an Alpha PC164 which takes 72 pin FPM simms,
> seemingly can't be upgraded to support USB.  I tried buying a USB2 pci
> card and installing it to my Alpha, it didn't work.  Even if it had, the
> firmware on that machine doesn't support USB booting and the add-in card
> I tried which is in use on another machine doesn't either.
> 
> USB is something that hasn't been around since day 1, sometime in the
> early 80's when the first IBM-AT was sold.  Floppy drives have existed
> all along.  USB hasn't even been bootable from day 1.  On an FIC VIA
> Va503+ motherboard, even after upgrading the bios, booting via a USB
> device is not supported.  I don't think there is a card that can be
> added to an older PC to support both USB and usb booting.  The
> disappearance of floppy drives is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Well, the VA-503+ most certainly supports booting from optical media, I
have to imagine the Alpha does too. The disappearing of floppies most
certainly isn't a recent phenomenon. Apple did it first somewhere in
1998-2000, though floppies had already been losing favor due to their
lack of space. 5 years isn't recent.

For that matter, you can also simply purchase a modern hard drive for
your Alpha and transport data on that. Not cheap, but IDE works on most
older systems...

> In the interest of a no moving parts solution, I don't want to
> substitute CD booting for floppy booting.  Between scratching disks 
> and burning out the laser, the floppy disk approach to running 
> etherboot is probably both more reliable and cheaper.

Ha! The optical drive will be massively more reliable. I've seen lots of
floppies die, not nearly so much optical media. With the optical media
and no contact, once you know the media is good, it will work for years.
With the physical contact needed with floppies, that disk will be slowly
wearing out. Reliability massively favors optical media. Further, with a
small number of systems the price differential is minimal; with many
systems the cost in time is so much lower that optical is a massively
better deal.

> Are there any flash drives that plug into the IDE controller as ATAPI
> devices which look like a cdrom?  Va503+'s can boot from ATAPI cdrom
> drives.

They generally look like hard drives to software. They're around though
I haven't gone looking recently.


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