Are floppy disks dead or do you still use them regularly?

[turrican9]

So I'm interested in hearing if people here still use floppy disks regularly or using floppy emulators like Gotek or HXC. And yes, I know alot of us uses whdload. I have all options. I have about 300 error free working floppy disks now.

[Arnie]

HXC for me. I don't even own an Amiga floppy drive.

[jPV]

I don't have any floppy emulator, but I also don't use real floppies much either. I have hard drives in about all of my Amigas. So, no option for me in this poll

[Jope]

I use real floppies a lot, it is quite convenient to transfer small files over between machines with a floppy.

I also have a couple of different floppy emulators, but those are mainly used for running demo compos.

All of my real amigas normally have a working floppy drive as DF0. :-)

[Locutus]

Floppies, *twitch*

With old stuff, i prefer to only remember the parts that where actually fun ;-)

[Jope]

I also do a lot of archival work, so there's no option but to use a real drive there. :-)

[alpine9000]

I might use them if I had some. Anyone got a source ?

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by Jope

I also do a lot of archival work, so there's no option but to use a real drive there. :-)

The only reason i can imagine to use real drives :-)

[BarryB]

Same here, buy a lot of stuff on floppys (or is it floppies?) and archive them so need to use physical hardware! I also use emulation a lot with floppy images so can we have a 'Both' option in you poll

[PortuguesePilot]

I actually like floppy disks. I like the idea, the design, the mechanism, etc.. I love the noisy and apparently hefty work a disk drive does when reading a floppy. I even love small little things, like the little drawings I did on their stickers and every single floppy disk had its singularity, its uniqueness, its individuality. I even love their scent and its immensely nostalgic retro feel.

But I hate how flimsy, fragile, unreliable and prone to damage they are. I hate it when I pick up a disk that yesterday was all peachy and today it messes my disk drive, decalibrating the headers or even damaging the sensors. I hate the sense of loss when a floppy disk is unrepairable and I loose the game that was in it. I hate the frustration of having to spend quite some time recalibrating a disk drive after an experience with a bad disk, sometimes to the point of having to physically open up the disk drive and having to mettle with it internally. I especially HATE it when the disk drive is rendered unrepairable because of a severely faulty floppy disk (have had at least two of these situations).

So, now-a-days, I have two USB Gotek drives on two of my Amigas and I love how smooth and reliable they are; how they even seem to take less time to load games than an actual, physical floppy disk drive; I love the fact that you store your "disks" in a small, single flash pen instead of having tens of drawers filled up with floppy disk archives which are cumbersome and potentially damageable.

I still have two Amigas in stock condition with their original floppy disk drive in place. Those are the ones I use when I'm most inclined for a trip down nostalgia lane. I also use old, DB9 joysticks with those Amigas for the full "I'm back in 1990" feel. But that happens only ever so often (about once a month, perhaps) yet I use my other Goteked Amigas every day - which means that I use floppy emulators a lot more. I love the ease with which you can add ADFs to them and significantly expand your games library, I love how you can fetch the best cracks/versions of every game instead of sticking with the ones you had 30 years ago, I love the way that you just connect the USB flash drive to a PC and it's ready to go and then on to the Amiga and it's ready to go, I love the fact that I can cram what would be, literally, a room full of disks onto a very small 32GB flash pen, etc..

I also adhere to the "third option" already mentioned on previous comments: WHDLoad. It is even better than a Gotek: faster, more versatile and with added improvements to many games, it is the choice of champions. That's what I use with my A1200. The A500 I use every day has a Gotek drive, since I haven't fitted any Hard Disk on any of my A500.

So, technically, I use both floppies and emuators, though the one I use the most - excluding WHDLoad, which isn't part of the poll - is the Gotek floppy emulator (which I have in both Cortex and HxC flavour). Disks are awesome to look at and even to operate with and are the ultimate nostalgic experience, but their downsides are just too numerous and troublesome to be worth a daily experience.

tl;dr: I mostly use floppy emulators, 'cause they're easy to use, can store lots of content, the USB flash drives are PC/Amiga interchangeable and their operation is much less prone to trouble.

[demolition]

+1 to PortuguesePilot. Despite their problems, I like the nostalgic feeling with real floppies although the Amigas I use most all have HDDs in them. I also have a Gotek in an external cabinet so I can hook it up to the Amigas that do not have HDDs in them. But I do still prefer to use real floppies with those.
With my C64, I mainly use my 1541 Ultimate-II cart for convenience, but I also have a few 1541-II drives and a bunch of floppies for it.

[Mrs Beanbag]

strange, i had a dream about floppy disks last night.

my own floppy drive died a death, i've got a HxC but rarely even use that, i transfer files via SD card/PCMCIA these days.

[dannyp1]

All of my Amiga's have disk drives but they are mainly only used for transferring files between machines. I also keep several disks around for setting up new OS's with MUI, AHI, XAD, DM2, etc. on them.

[turrican9]

Thanks for all the answers. Yes I left out whdload from this poll as it is HD storage and also left out a combined option for floppy emulator and floppy disks because I wanted to get a general feeling as to how many people are still using floppy disks. Even though I know many people uses all options I wanted to see if anyone had left real floppies completely.

As I said, I use all the options myself. I voted for floppy disks because I now use them regularly for games. I find that nothing can beat that feeling of handling disks and hearing the floppy drive working. Even just sitting with X-copy fixing or copying disks gives me quite the good feeling.

However, I must admit that my Goteks are very handy and of course my whdload setups. I tried a sound mod for one of my Goteks and removed it because the sound from a PC speaker is just wrong and quite annoying compared to a real disk drive. I found it better with no sound.

Edit: I also got a huge batch of Amiga floppy disks from a friend that had bought them together with some Amigas on ebay. I found that many of these had mold on them and were smelly. Cleaning them with an ear cotton and isoprop fixed many of them. but in general, considering how many disks there were, very few of them could be fixed easily. I suspect many if these disks came from a country with alot of humidity. I can imagine that living in those types of places will make the use of old floppy disks difficult. All my old Amiga disks from 1991 had no mold on them (low humidity in North of Norway) and could save probably 75% of them by using x-copy and rewrite them.

One of the first things I did after I started this retro journey over 1 year ago was cutting into my perfect condition (no yellowing) Amiga 500 to fit a Gotek. Had I known what I know now I would never have done it, even though I took my time and turned out pretty good. Since then I have aquired 4 more Amiga 500s which I have not been cutting.

Here is how it looks:

[idrougge]

I don't use floppies enough on my Amigas to bother with floppy emulators. It's easier to just grab a floppy from a box when I need one for a special purpose; usually installing some old Amiga which wouldn't have an emulator in the first place.
On my Atari ST, which lacks both hard drive and network, it's another question, and here a Gotek is a great upgrade.

[turrican9]

Another thing is that using floppies/floppy emulators for games instead of whdload is first of all most of us were using floppies back in the day and did not have a hard drive and secondly, cracked floppy games have trainers (cracktros can also be quite nostalgic). whdload games usually don't have trainers and of course no cracktros. In general I find that using floppies, even from the Gotek is more nostalgic than using whdload. Loading Gotek menu to mount floppy images every time is not the solution. I have over 500 ADF images loaded into tracks and have a list of what adf is in what track. This way it's much faster to load up a game, demo or program.

[meynaf]

Floppies have the advantage they never die completely. Your floppy drive can cease to work, this won't destroy the data on all your disks at once - and when a disk is itself damaged, there is rarely no way to get back at least some data out of it.
But the shortcomings (slow, low capacity, unreliable, no disks manufactured anymore) outweight the advantages, so apart for nostalgia i see no reason in using floppies in 2016.
As i don't personnally have the nostalgia, sorry for people who wanted adfs out of my game ports, they're primarily for hd use

Anyway even if i wanted to, i wouldn't be able - as i have no working floppy drive anymore...

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Floppies have the advantage they never die completely. Your floppy drive can cease to work, this won't destroy the data on all your disks at once - and when a disk is itself damaged, there is rarely no way to get back at least some data out of it.
But the shortcomings (slow, low capacity, unreliable, no disks manufactured anymore) outweight the advantages, so apart for nostalgia i see no reason in using floppies in 2016.
As i don't personnally have the nostalgia, sorry for people who wanted adfs out of my game ports, they're primarily for hd use

Anyway even if i wanted to, i wouldn't be able - as i have no working floppy drive anymore...

I can agree in that there is certainly no future in floppy disks. However, the 300 or so working floppy disks I have now will probably last me for a long, long time. Floppy drives can be repaired and I have several spare ones. And of course PC floppy drives can be converted into Amiga drives. However, sooner or later floppy drives and floppy disks will cease to exist since they are not produced anymore, and haven't been made in many years.

[turrican9]

btw, I ordered one of these now. I think this is the most sexy looking thing you can get for use with a Gotek. I've been looking at it many times but finally couldn't resist it anymore. I think I will put this one into one of my Amiga 500s.

[desiv]

OK, I do like the look of that!!!
Nice..

desiv