Hail and farewell to floppy drives

By CHRIS BARTON

Whither your floppy? I ask because I've used mine so little lately, I'm thinking of having it permanently removed.

I am, of course, talking about the floppy disk drive - that slot on the front of your PC that whirrs and clicks when you insert a plastic coated square that really isn't floppy at all. Even though most PCs still come with one installed, it's a drive that has become more or less redundant.

But the silly slot remains - a testament to a bygone era. Older PC users will remember a time when floppies really were floppy - cardboard thin and 5.25in rather than the present 3.5in square. Some may even remember the 8in variety.

Back then - the eighties - they were the only means to get software into your PC and to transfer files. It was a tedious, primitive method now superseded by the CD-Rom and the connected internet PC.

But the floppy did have a useful purpose for those occasions when carrying digital files with you was more convenient than sending over the network or by email. It's a need that remains today - especially with the growing market in digital cameras, and MP3 players. Sadly, the floppy disk with its pathetic 1.4MB capacity just doesn't cut it for carrying multiple audio, video and photo files.

Fortunately there are a number of alternatives. But unlike the more or less standard floppy drive, the new portable media is a plague of incompatible competing technologies.

Trying to understand flash memory card formats, for example - SD, MS, XD, CF, SM, MMC - will send anyone mad.

(For more on the differences go to www.steves-digicams.com/flash_memory.html)

But the beauty of these cards is not just their postage stamp-like size, but also their capacity. CompactFlash cards already offer a whopping 1GB and Secure Digital is promising the same next year and 2GB the year after.

But with so many formats what is the poor PC user to do? Many of these memory cards can be indirectly accessed by attaching the device itself to the PC, usually via a USB (universal serial bus) port.

That's the same route USB memory card devices such as the Disk Key use. But when you're attaching a camera, camcorder or MP3 player, you have somewhat defeated the marvellous portability of the new flash cards.

What PCs really need instead of a floppy drive is a combo card reader - one that can handle all these flash memory formats plus the PC Cards used on notebook computers. There's a variety of these on the market, so why don't PC manufacturers start selling PCs with these installed instead of a floppy that no one bothers to use?

The same nonsense of conflicting standards is happening with DVD recorders. Again there's acronym soup - DVD-Ram, -R, -RW, +R, +RW - guaranteed to send a consumer screaming from the room. (For help through the morass go to www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html).

It's also really annoying that you need a separate drive for CD burning. Why can't they put all this stuff in one drive? Fortunately, they now can.

A number of manufacturers are releasing multi-drives. Panasonic's LF-D521, for example, not only handles DVD-Ram, -R and -RW formats but also does CD-R and CD-RW. Super.

But just when you think sanity is about to break out, someone decides to throw a new spanner into the works. Record companies have already introduced copy-protection for audio CDs - making them unplayable on some PC CD players. That prompted Netherlands giant Philips Electronics - the co-inventor of the CD format - to insist that CDs with anti-copying technology not use the "Compact Disc" logo because they are not proper CDs at all. Be alert next time you buy.

But just when you think you've got this CD/DVD nightmare sussed, there's a new, better, bigger, brighter disk format - Blu-ray - on the horizon. Aaargh! That's the last thing we need.

* Email Chris Barton

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