What’s the Shelf life of Floppies again?
Posted by Doc Winters on January 20, 2009
Some time yesterday I was given a stack of about a hundred or so 3.5″ Floppy Disks by my father that once belonged to me yes those things, remember the thing we relied on before everything had a chip in it and could be used to store information on. I took those archaic devices to my Vista machine, and transferred the information contained therein onto an external hard drive.
Apparently, these disks service life had expired a good year or so ago, as over half of them had corrupted long before I could access their data, and those that I could access, while I could view the data, I could not do anything with it. Though in hindsight, there was nothing on those disks that was particularly important, or already woefully out of date.
Though there was one thing that I had forgotten as I scoured through the piles of plastic and metal, was just how slow these transfer mediums are compared to their modern counterparts. I mean it took me most of the night to get through them, nine hours to get through 138 mb… I have a 3 gig micro SD on my phone that takes nine seconds to process… We have sure come a long way in such a short time.
A new feature I’m bringing to the Darkside as frequent as whenever I get a lull will be Profiles in Courage, an idea I got while playing Mass Effect. I will be focusing one page for each major character in my Novel, so keep watching as I will be posting them here as well from now one.
The first Profile in Courage is the Seth Legion itself, chronicling its beginnings, and telling you never seen before information about it. I will be covering a new character every so often to keep watching to find out more about the main cast
