The Floppy is Dead! Long Live the Floppy!

Read that in the paper today, yay!

Have only used a floppy disc a very minute amount of times the past few years and only for installing drivers. Although most OSs can use USB pen drives to install drivers I've come across a fair few computers where the USB ports don't work (b0rked or default drivers not working) so floppy is the only alternative so tbh its not 100% dead.

Hopefully these n00bs in schools will realise how outdated floppy is. I remember being a kid in year 3 holding the floppy without touching the metal part, like a precious diamond. Now its a football :p

i luv the part on "the save button still looks like a floppy" lol. homage indeed.

i do still use the floppy quite abit... most important is RAID driver during windows install on my DFI board. others probably some misc. stuff i use from the office coz the 15yr old system still use floppies...

good gawd...

I rearlised floppys were utterly out of date when I worked out that my internet connection was faster than you could read from a floppy. Still very usefull though as you can get dos on one and use it to fix the MBR quite easily on older pcs.

I remember when the floppy drives were actually floppy... those big ones that made good frisbees (although cds make better ones) ah, those were the days.

5 1/2 inch floppies ruled! bring them back damnit!

Ah well. It had to happen some time.

My local PC World hasn't sold FDDs or floppy disks for at least six months. I remember because I needed some a while back and had to go on a multi-shop disk hunt. :(

Ambivalence is the order of the day here, I think.

This doesn't mean the format's dead. It's just dead amongst enthusiasts; we've no common/regular need to use one anymore.

Yet, only saturday at work (Jessops) someone asked what format to bring a picture in on, so that it could be sent off for a biiig print.

"So, do I just bring the picture in on a floppy disc?"

And I guarantee at least once a month, someone will come in asking, 'Do you take pictures from floppy discs?'.

:( My answer from now-on will be one of;

"No, no-one takes floppy discs anymore -- PC World don't even sell them." or, "No, the 90's called -- they want their format back!" or maybe just a look of disgust. I'm undecided as of yet...

The problem is businesses. Some (I swear it's the council workers mainly) still seem to rely on the damn things! Need their heads feeling, tbh.

Where I co-oped we still had a copy of windows 3.1 on floppys. and i'm pretty sure i have a copy of windows 95 on floppys. i have a drive in my computer but its not even hooked up.

Originally Posted by Redbeaver
i luv the part on "the save button still looks like a floppy" lol. homage indeed.

i do still use the floppy quite abit... most important is RAID driver during windows install on my DFI board. others probably some misc. stuff i use from the office coz the 15yr old system still use floppies...

good gawd...

same here with the RAID drivers, I use a RAID 0 system on my main pc and have to use a floppy to install that during install, that is about the only time I ever use the drive though so it will be nice to have no need for it, will just need to get another blanking plate for that slot now hehe

I think my family might still have it's copy of windows 3.1 and office on it's many floppy disks.

I put a floppy in my system just in case I needed it for drivers or anything like that, but I've never used one since moving to XP.

I hope that one of the big memory companies like Corsair or Kingston reinvents the floppy so it becomes a media that we will sall want to use again. I think 250GB Floppies would be awesome. Who would need the HDD then?

its like VHS. Do people really still use floppys and VHS????

My hate towards floppys was that my files would be currupt all the time. So easy to destroy data on a floppy.

I have not stored anything on a floppy for a very long time. Even college work was not stored on a floppy. My college 8 years ago had 100MB zip drives in every PC. Everyone had zip disks to store files on in college back in 99.

And now its USB memory sticks as they are as cheap as chips. 4GB for £20 aint bad.

Originally Posted by Almightyrastus
same here with the RAID drivers, I use a RAID 0 system on my main pc and have to use a floppy to install that during install, that is about the only time I ever use the drive though so it will be nice to have no need for it, will just need to get another blanking plate for that slot now hehe

The only time ive used a floppy in say the last 5 years would be for running memtest (which is now in the grub boot loader) and for sata drivers but i now prefer to use nlite, which i think can do raid drivers as well as sata but i may be wrong on that.... the last time i went to install windows (the normal way) the drive wouldn't even work

I use my floppy drive biannually for my reformat and reinstall of XP but besides that, I never use it. It's actually very rare that I even use my cd drive anymore because I mainly burn to dvds and my dvd-rw reads and burns just as fast as my cd-rw. Besides, half the time I have to remove my FDD and remove all the dust from it to get the damn thing to work anyways.

I still have my DOS 5.5 discs flying around somewhere here. And I still remember me and my friend playing Dune2...
I'll never let you down Floppy! N-E-V-E-R! At least I'll put a nail through you and find a nice place on my wall for you.

Originally Posted by mikeuk2004
its like VHS. Do people really still use floppys and VHS????

My hate towards floppys was that my files would be currupt all the time. So easy to destroy data on a floppy.

I have not stored anything on a floppy for a very long time. Even college work was not stored on a floppy. My college 8 years ago had 100MB zip drives in every PC. Everyone had zip disks to store files on in college back in 99.

And now its USB memory sticks as they are as cheap as chips. 4GB for £20 aint bad.

Lots of people still use VHS :(

Especially those with young kids.

ZIP disks were fun while they lasted. Way too damn expensive though. Last I checked, they're still ten bucks a pop, and a full bill for a JAZ disk (1GB). Impressive, considering you can buy a terabyte worth of DVD-Rs *and* a burner for that same $100.

I recently had to sort out an old Cel 333 and used one of my boot floppies to fdisk and format it before installing 98SE. But to transfer some driver downloads I had to burn a CD-RW, mainly to install the 5.2Mb 98SE drivers for my pendrive.

Main problem with floppies, 1.44Mb is just not enough. And I have several boot floppies in case one turns out to be b0rked. :(

Who remembers the old 8 inch floppies? The drives on my dad's CAD station were the size of a VHS recorder.

I hope this means motherboard manufacturers will stop releasing flash utilities that require DOS. Having to make bootable CDs to flash a BIOS is so tedious.

the only times i will need it will be when i need to format my pc or update the bios on some machines... can you update a bios with a pendrive?

Shouldn't that title be "the floppy is dead, long live the optical disc" or something like that? Given that the "long live.." thing refers to two people, the old(dead) king and the new(live) king?

As I said recently, I hate floppies but I will use them where it's simplest to do so. Annoying as they are they're still the simplest way for some things.

Originally Posted by cpemma
I recently had to sort out an old Cel 333 and used one of my boot floppies to fdisk and format it before installing 98SE. But to transfer some driver downloads I had to burn a CD-RW, mainly to install the 5.2Mb 98SE drivers for my pendrive.

Main problem with floppies, 1.44Mb is just not enough. And I have several boot floppies in case one turns out to be b0rked. :(

If you had 4 spare floppies laying around, you could have been oldschool and used a program like WinRAR to break it down to fit on floopies for you... god I remember those days.

Originally Posted by specofdust
Shouldn't that title be "the floppy is dead, long live the optical disc" or something like that? Given that the "long live.." thing refers to two people, the old(dead) king and the new(live) king?

Thats what I was thinking, but then alot of the time the titles on Bit Tech dont make sense :p

Who wrote this ill-researched splurge of non news? Looks like someone's going to regret getting their 14 year old nephew round for work experience.

Further floppy standards have also been eroded: whilst CD drives based their speed ratings on the "150Kb/s" floppy disk standard, the DVD revolution changed this basing the "x" rating on how long it took to read/write a disk (1x on CDR took the same length of time as 1x DVDR, but 1x DVDR = 1.4MB/second).

What in julian clary's name is all that about? CD drive speed ratings are based on the read speed of CD audio and have nothing to do with any kind of "floppy disk standard"... you'll be lucky to get 30-80KB/s using a 1.44MB HD floppy.

DVD speeds are similarly based on the standard read speed of DVD video. Bugger all to do with CD-Rs.

And to think someone's being paid to write this bilge...

Where I worked two years ago the small company had half invested in a network but still downloaded emails on 56k put them on floppy to give to the manager (who had the server as her work station(which wasn't networked))

I agree with fannypad this is non news, the reason PC world isn't selling any more drives/discs is because joe public hasn't bought enough to warrant stocking them for the last few months (maybe years) Find out when the sales started to plummet and that's your death date. PC World is not a dictator of standards merely an (expensive) retailer following market trends.

There's no replacement for floppies atm though, CDRs are unwieldy and scratch easily, USB keys hold too much of your personal data to hand over to someone else (like you would a floppy), setting up a network to copy one file is a pain, bluetooth doesn't have a standard enough interface for everyone to just use and the internet isn't always available.

Floppies could be carried around in a laptop bag with no case and for a quick file transfer you just whip out a floppy, copy and hand it over no worrying about other files cos you only gave the files you wanted give. It didn't even matter if that person didn't have their machine on or even with them because for under a quid a floppy never returning was no loss.

I'd like to see files "carried" on your fingerprint, you select the files to send have the recipient scan their finger on your computer then if they're both their machines are on the file is transferred over wifi/bt. Or uploaded automatically as soon as possible to an internet server for retrieval later using the fingerprint as ID/PW & encryption

PS What are new save icons going to look like Folder Icon? USB key? CD-R? HDD?

My floppy drive hasn't been used in over two years now, and two months ago it left my main rig completly.

Still have a giant box of discs tho, might sift through them at some point.

And my college still uses them occasionally, when we do network installs, and a utility is stored and a floppy and transferred to whoever needs it.

Although more ofter than not they end up on my flash drive anyway...

*raises toast to another fallen format*

I use them on a daily basis at work. they are the best medium for sending things like PGP keys.

infact just recently we had batch of new PC's to be rolled out and for the first time pc's turned up without floppy drives. first thing i had to do was put a floppy drive in so that the first one could be configured properly and a image taken.

they are not going to be gone as fast as people think.

On the point of the speeds, yeah I think it's from CD Audio. The time it takes to play Beethoven's 5th symphony perfectly is 74 minutes.... and 1x writing speed for both DVD and CD is 74 minutes...

I 'seem' to remember it being along those lines anyhow. But I have been known to be wrong, very wrong in fact.

Originally Posted by aon`aTv.gsus666
I still have my DOS 5.5 discs flying around somewhere here.

Nice

My old man still has copies of DOS 3, Novell Netware and SMART (amongst other things), all on 5.25" disks! I think he's got some PC magazine cover disks too...

Did anyone ever used to perform the old 'hole drilling' trick to 720k floppies? I remember doing that many a time when I needed to transfer large(!) files but had no 1.44Mb disks around. It worked, but cut the disk lifespan down to a few weeks!

As a retro media, I like floppies - they remind me of the good old days of the Amiga/AtariST.

Originally Posted by Mattt
I use them on a daily basis at work. they are the best medium for sending things like PGP keys.

infact just recently we had batch of new PC's to be rolled out and for the first time pc's turned up without floppy drives. first thing i had to do was put a floppy drive in so that the first one could be configured properly and a image taken.

they are not going to be gone as fast as people think.

I'm not so sure. Now that Vista doesn't require a floppy for install time drivers, the first thing PC manufacturers will do to save cash will be to ditch floppy drives. And then motherboard manufaturers will stop including a floppy drive headers on most boards. In a couple of years from now it'll be like trying to find a motherboard with ISA slots.

At the company I work for we haven't bought a floppy drive equipped machine in over 3 years. We still keep a USB one around for BIOS updates and the odd occasion when a government client sends through supplier framework documents on a floppy. Making machine images and configuring? Haven't you heard of PXE / BOOTP? Much easier than having to open up new machines to install some hardware from the dark ages.

Floppy disks are also a threat to the RIAA/MPAA

In a press conference today the RIAA stated the following:

"We are excited that floppy disks are no more. They were one of the worse sources of music piracy, as all the data was written to the disk in an magnetic format. Users could simply copy data to another diskette."

However, the RIAA and MPAA have plans on adapting this technology to drives in the future:

"Our major record labels have learned something valuable from the floppy disk era - magnets can destroy these disks. We are working on a magnetic media format that will self-destruct after 3 uses on an individual machine, with much higher storage capacity, to be used to distribute Blue Ray 2nd generation discs."

So what am I to do with my floppy collection, donate it to a musuem?
"And on your left you will see a pirated copy of DOS and Windows 3.0"
And some smart *ss kid will ask WTF is DOS.

I can see the future

Originally Posted by speedfreek
So what am I to do with my floppy collection, donate it to a musuem?
"And on your left you will see a pirated copy of DOS and Windows 3.0"
And some smart *ss kid will ask WTF is DOS.

I can see the future

I'm sure some kid will chime in "Wasn't that the codename for Windows 2046?"

Regarding fl00dl3's post;

The RIAA are morons. You can't get a single 128kb/s MP3 onto a floppy, how does the fact that the data can be easily copied pose a threat? Musicians didn't release their albums in 3.5" format, so any music thats on a floppy would be easy to copy anyway because its already pirated. Unless they're talking about ZIP disks, and even then the same applies.

I still use a floppy drive every single day.

you think CNC mills and lathes that cost from $40,000-$100,000 would have USB ports....
but at that price $1k for a computer to use DNC is like a drop in the bucket.

strange enough it only seems to be the Haas controllers that use floppy's When I use waterjet's and lasers they tend to always be hardwired for DNC so they forgo the floppy altogether.

our newest Lathe finally has a color LCD screen. I thought monochrome 15" crt's died in the early 90's

My floppy's been used quite a bit in recent times to transfer the DOS-Games I have back upped on my PC to my old 486 for a bit of nostalgia. (Some would work under XP, but most don't properly ... )

This reminds me of when Dixons (yeah, as in PC world dixons) stopped selling analogue radios and the fu-raw over that.

bilbothebaggins - I recently discovered dosbox which lets me run classic dos games on my mac! Seeing the cheesy intro for Strike Commander almost brought a tear to my eye. There's a version for most platforms, just google it.

I haven't used a floppy in years. I can do BIOS upgrades with my USB key or with a bootable CD. For Windows installations, I integrate the drivers using nLite.

Good riddance. Floppy drives as well as media are notoriously unreliable and known to fail at any given time. I've even had floppy controllers on modern motherboards do the same. I'm not surprised, they can't seriously put a lot of time into making them.

Don't copy that floppy!

Originally Posted by Jamie
Don't copy that floppy!

I remember that Video!

I still have a box of comodore c64 floppys (the flexible ones, modded for dual side use)
And still have floppys for the Atari ST, and the 1.44mb HD floppys for the pc. although just about 10 pieces for bootups and stuff. But did not touched that for about 2 years. the last time i used it, was for installing sata drivers because the winxp could not find a cd with installation for 3th party scisi devices.

To me the floppy and floppydrive are the only hardware that is not 'evolved' or progressed like other hardware. All other hardware has come and go, like isa slots, socket types, memory types and such, the floppy stayed. The sizes of harddisk has increased 30times, memory increased 20 times, cd size increased, speed increased, evolved to dvd and soon to hd-dvd/br.

The floppy still the same speed, size and dimensions. I still remember saying to a friend 2 years ago: "why dont they just remove the damn thing from the motherboard, it saves space for other usefull stuff and also makes room in the bios and on the chipset. Nobody uses it anymore, windows still wants to find one, even if there is no fdrive to be found in a hundred miles from my pc. I even disabled it in the bios. They removed isa slots too and change sockets every damn month so wy wont they just remove the damn old and slow thing like the floppy drive and put in something better, they did with all the other hardware!"

I still believe this statement. And i still believe the fd is absolete since 2003. Name one driver that is released on a floppy with you hardware purcases in the last 3 years. I bet you will trying to remember for at least 10 minutes and still dont remember when you last seen a driver on a floppy...

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan

I still believe this statement. And i still believe the fd is absolete since 2003. Name one driver that is released on a floppy with you hardware purcases in the last 3 years. I bet you will trying to remember for at least 10 minutes and still dont remember when you last seen a driver on a floppy...

Motherboard SATA drivers. I know a lot that still come with them on a floppy.

Now that Vista can see SATA/RAID without the need for extra drivers, I no longer have a use for my floppy :)

Originally Posted by metarinka
I still use a floppy drive every single day.

you think CNC mills and lathes that cost from $40,000-$100,000 would have USB ports....
but at that price $1k for a computer to use DNC is like a drop in the bucket.

strange enough it only seems to be the Haas controllers that use floppy's When I use waterjet's and lasers they tend to always be hardwired for DNC so they forgo the floppy altogether.

our newest Lathe finally has a color LCD screen. I thought monochrome 15" crt's died in the early 90's

:)

Yup - lots of the high end scientific kit in my lab only has a FDD. It's not like it would be that difficult to put even a ZIP drive in or something... but no, we're stuck with only being able to put three files (max) on a disk.

I remember the days when my parents owned an acorn A3000. I remember borrowing the game Caonnon Fodder for it, it came on numerous 3.5" floppy's. I decided to copy it, which was a mistake as it took hours of inserting the original disc, then inserting the new disc only for it to copy a few bytes accross (pressing ok in between). Those are the worst memories I have of floppy's.

It was worth it, since it was an awesome game (anyone else get to the last level to find that it was impossible to complete?)

Originally Posted by ralph.pickering

At the company I work for we haven't bought a floppy drive equipped machine in over 3 years.

Well the company I work for is only 3 years old most of our equipment is HP and all was brought new and all but the most recent set of PC's were provided with floppy drives. it was only with the recent change (october last year as far as i rember) to DX2200 as the standard buisness PC that the floppy drive was dropped.

Originally Posted by ralph.pickering

Making machine images and configuring? Haven't you heard of PXE / BOOTP? Much easier than having to open up new machines to install some hardware from the dark ages.

Im hardly going to roll out 100 machines without PXE booting

however for building the image and certain parts of the sysprep the use of floppy disks is required. especially if your in an environment that uses alot of bespoke software, in my case a financial institution.

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan
. Name one driver that is released on a floppy with you hardware purcases in the last 3 years. I bet you will trying to remember for at least 10 minutes and still dont remember when you last seen a driver on a floppy...

I had a DLink USB Network port a couple of years back as a free gift with an order for some computer stuff, which had drivers on a floppy disk.
I was going to use on my old laptop which lacks a network port, but it didn't work as the laptop was running Win95.

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan


To me the floppy and floppydrive are the only hardware that is not 'evolved' or progressed like other hardware.

The floppy still the same speed, size and dimensions.

Nope, it did. There were many different sizes Starting with the IBM's 8" floppy.

8" in 1969 - 1.5 Mbits to 1.2 Mbytes
5 1/4" in 1976 - 110 kb to 360 kb
3 1/2" in 1982 - 264 kb to 2.88 Mbytes
3" in 1984 - 360 kb
2" in 1985 - 720 kb

and then we saw the wopping 120MB 3 1/2 Floppy in 1996 and in 1997 saw the 240MB 3 1/2" floppy. The floppy has changed and evolved alot. LS240 was the end of floppys as CDRW and DVDRW have much greater capacitys and cheaper.

Originally Posted by dullonien
I remember the days when my parents owned an acorn A3000. I remember borrowing the game Caonnon Fodder for it, it came on numerous 3.5" floppy's. I decided to copy it, which was a mistake as it took hours of inserting the original disc, then inserting the new disc only for it to copy a few bytes accross (pressing ok in between). Those are the worst memories I have of floppy's.

It was worth it, since it was an awesome game (anyone else get to the last level to find that it was impossible to complete?)

Those were the days. Id spend ages (SEGA) trying to copy a 10 disk game. so anoying but on the amiga. Same process though, copy a little bit at a time. I wanted Cannon Foder, my mate had it and knew how much I wanted it so he copied it for me. However on one disk he deliberatly did not copy the last little bit of the disk. So id get half way in the game and it crashed all the time while playing. Was not funny on my behalf at the time but is now :)

Originally Posted by bloodcar
If you had 4 spare floppies laying around, you could have been oldschool and used a program like WinRAR to break it down to fit on floopies for you... god I remember those days.

I remember one time when i was at uni: downloading a game demo or something and using winrar to spread it over no less than 24 floppy disks to take it home ;)

Was still quicker than trying to download it on a 56k modem ^^

DXR_13KE - get a Gigabyte board, upgrade the BIOS from within windows, no floppies necessary. :D

L J

Originally Posted by Paradigm Shifter
:)

Yup - lots of the high end scientific kit in my lab only has a FDD. It's not like it would be that difficult to put even a ZIP drive in or something... but no, we're stuck with only being able to put three files (max) on a disk.

yah it seems to a plague on high end equipment, depending on the instrument and such it almost makes financial sense to drop anothr $1K on a computer just so you can have it networked and not have to lug around floppies. I like the waterjet I'm using now as it's fully networked so I can make changes from home and just connect straight to the machine over the internets and change it. Our CNC plasma cutter still has a ticker tape :o

Originally Posted by rupbert
Now that Vista can see SATA/RAID without the need for extra drivers, I no longer have a use for my floppy :)

Heh, I thought it would 'see' my Sil3112A set, but did it heck!

Thought the FDD was coming out, until I realised I could download the drivers on another machine, stick them onto a USB pen and it would mount the drive there and then in order to install the drivers.

That's definitely a nail in the FDD coffin. Just 501 more to go

I've got a digital camera that writes the floppies and is handy for web work (don't need to shrink images to use them). When I built my nw desktop I put in a LS120 drive in hopes the IDE interface would be faster for reading them.

Originally Posted by ralph.pickering
I'm not so sure. Now that Vista doesn't require a floppy for install time drivers, the first thing PC manufacturers will do to save cash will be to ditch floppy drives. And then motherboard manufaturers will stop including a floppy drive headers on most boards. In a couple of years from now it'll be like trying to find a motherboard with ISA slots.

At the company I work for we haven't bought a floppy drive equipped machine in over 3 years. We still keep a USB one around for BIOS updates and the odd occasion when a government client sends through supplier framework documents on a floppy. Making machine images and configuring? Haven't you heard of PXE / BOOTP? Much easier than having to open up new machines to install some hardware from the dark ages.

1. What makes you think that everyone is going to update to vista?
For most businesses its a pointless expense.
The comapny i work for sepnds a heck of a lot of money developing its software so that its the best there is, and they have decided its not worth making the software 64 bit compatible for XP64 bit , never mind this Vista garbage. I dont think vista will be really widely taken up for a long while yet.


2. Ditching floppy drives probably wont save very much money at all. I think all the main PC manufacturers will proably be getting FDD drives for <1£. Think economies of scale.

3. What about servers?

Seeing as the subject has gone on a nostalgic tangent...


I still feed my Amiga 1200 with floppies on a daily basis:

http://www.urbanbomb.co.uk/amiga.jpg



I use it to run Octamed 4, for sequencing these two circa 1988 S950's (which also store everything on floppies):

http://www.urbanbomb.co.uk/s950.jpg

Originally Posted by Fatboy
1. What makes you think that everyone is going to update to vista?
For most businesses its a pointless expense.
The comapny i work for sepnds a heck of a lot of money developing its software so that its the best there is, and they have decided its not worth making the software 64 bit compatible for XP64 bit , never mind this Vista garbage. I dont think vista will be really widely taken up for a long while yet.


2. Ditching floppy drives probably wont save very much money at all. I think all the main PC manufacturers will proably be getting FDD drives for <1£. Think economies of scale.

3. What about servers?

I think you're missing the point. I'm not talking about upgrading to Vista. I'm talking about Vista on new equipment. In my experience, once a new Microsoft OS is released the supply of the old one dries up pretty quickly, and you have to go with the new.

I think you'll find floppy drives will be costing a little more than that, especially when you add in cables and the labour costs of fitting them. And when margins on computer equipment are as slim as they are, every pound counts. And then, as demand for a component drops, the price goes up. You can still buy 5.25in floppy drives, but you pay close to £40 for the privilege.

Servers are always the last to drop legacy technology, and the last to adopt new. My point is not that from tomorrow or next week, floppies will cease to exist, but merely that the writing is on the wall. Give it a year or so and machines with floppies will be the exception to the rule.

Originally Posted by ralph.pickering
I think you're missing the point. I'm not talking about upgrading to Vista. I'm talking about Vista on new equipment. In my experience, once a new Microsoft OS is released the supply of the old one dries up pretty quickly, and you have to go with the new.

how many buinesses are going to want all of there new equipment on vista and the rest on XP?

for a new OS rollout its going to be in UAT for a very very very long time and in the mean time the companys still need pc's that work with XP. most companys have a 4 - 5 year renewal plan on PC's, so come back then when most corprations have got rid of or are about to get rid of there current machines and say that floppy is dead, because then it realy will be. but for now its alive and kicking for a good few years at least.

Originally Posted by ralph.pickering

Servers are always the last to drop legacy technology, and the last to adopt new.

wow you have a very backwards veiw if you belive that.

The server market is always the one pushing the technology forward. its only after months / years that it filters down to the standard machines.

what was first 64bit CPU's for servers or desktops?

or how about networking? what do you think had gigabit network ports as standard first? servers or desktops?

how about on board RAID? or temperature monitors and alarms on board? cpu throttling? the high power PSU's were seeing more and more of in desktops now a days?

I can go on :)

all you have to do to see what technology we will have in our pc's in 6months / 1 years time is see what is becoming standard in servers today. :D

Well said TBH.

I cant wait till we get SAS as standard on enthusiast boards :D

I see SAS in a different view to what you do.

To me SAS is a programming language that I use in work to build databases

lol its even worse for me!

we have SAS the database program, with the data sitting on a SAS array, which is connected to a server witch is looked over by a 3rd party server monitoring company call SAS!!!

Originally Posted by Mattt
lol its even worse for me!

we have SAS the database program, with the data sitting on a SAS array, which is connected to a server witch is looked over by a 3rd party server monitoring company call SAS!!!

Just destroy SAS. I've spent the last 6 months arguing with it trying to convert legacy data to more modern equivalents.

Originally Posted by DougEdey
I remember that Video!

I've got the avi of that on my PC somewhere

*searches*

Um.... found it, ah the cheesyness of it. Shame the video doesnt fiton the floppy!

I havnt used a floppy in a long time, I think I used one last year to update my EPOS system @ work, which still uses Windows 3.11!!!!!! Ah the joy of that system.

Originally Posted by Blademrk
I see SAS in a different view to what you do.

To me SAS is a programming language that I use in work to build databases

That is the version of SAS i hate!

I much prefer serial attached storage