Do you still remember floppy disks?

Floppy to USB Flash Drive

I still occasionally come across those now outdated types of data storage, but they seem to have become mainly extinct; in fact, I doubt my children would even be able to identify them!

But floppy disks were quite a break-through at their time and undoubtedly served their purpose!

The History of Floppy Disks

In an era of exclusively magnetic storage media, like tapes, floppy disks were the first truly portable data storage solution. The first 8 inch floppy disk was introduced by IBM in 1971 and further developed to the more wide-spread 3.5 inch floppy disks in 1974. Lightweight, small in size and inexpensive; their only downfall was their limited storage capacity which was a mere 1.4MB.

Moving on to Optical Storage

It soon become apparent that floppy disks just were not going to cut it when it came to the increase in data storage demands. And in the 1980s CD’s were introduced that could store 680MB of data so seemed revolutionary, only to be superseded by DVDs in the 1990s holding a whopping 4.7GB.

Modern Data Storage

Also in the 1980’s, Toshiba invented the first flash drive data storage medium. A new technology, allowing for entire sections of memory to be erased quickly and easily by applying a voltage to a single wire connected to a group of cells (Wikipedia).

However, flash drives weren’t commercialised until 2000 with the now NAND flash memory forms forming the core of the removable USB flash drives we all use today. You can now get flash drives with capacities up to 2TB, but even with the more common smaller 32GB flash drives, that would give you enough space to store as many as 22,000 floppy drives – pretty impressive!

And a final bit of advice…

Data storage options will continue to evolve and the longer you wait to convert your data from old storage media such as floppy disks to more modern media, the trickier (and more expensive!) it will be.

Our advice would be to dust off those floppy disks now to convert them to modern USB Flash media – you’ll be amazed how many floppy disks will fit onto one flash drive!

With the right equipment, the conversion is pretty straightforward, but if you need any help or advice, just get in touch and we get it all sorted for you!

Any other tips you would like to share with us? Leave your comment below!

Floppy to USB Flash Drive