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Comment by jzombie | Hacker News Reader

I miss those 3.5" disks (not the storage capacity, but the physical size).

I miss portable physical storage in general. USB drives aren’t the same because they are both a media and interface. I guess the spiritual successor is SD cards but I would love a cheap, not necessarily huge or super fast storage, but with excellent resilience and archival properties for 50+ year storage. That’s a niche I feel like was never filled. The debate around CD/DVD/Blu-ray and various dyes never really died so I never dared using them for that. Best recommendation for home use (because tape is more enterprise oriented) seems to be multiple hard drives and verifying them every now and then, but that always felt like such a crutch, haha.

Nice size, rigid, satisfying spring action, convenient reading and writing noises.

Also you could fling them clear across the room, frisbee style. The 5.25" ones not so much.

I agree. It's too easy to lose a thumb drive, even easier to lose an SD card.

SD cards are a completely useless size these days: they're too small and easily lost, but they're too big for modern devices. For adding storage to a phone, for instance, a microSD card is much more useful (although easier lost of couse). A regular SD card is just way too big for that, and most of the space inside wasted.

A thumb drive is much better, as long as it not one of those thumb drives that's barely bigger than a USB port. But for offline storage that can be easily filed into a cabinet and paged through, floppy disks really were a great size. You can't file thumb drives; they're too narrow and thick, so a collection of them just ends up being a pile.

It's really too bad we don't have some kind of inexpensive, high-reliability, high-density offline storage format that resembles 3.5" floppies.

Regular SD cards are at least easy to handle. MicroSD are so darn tiny, sometimes pretty hard to pick up.

I know modern devices don't have a lot of space, but regular SD cards and mini-SIMs weren't really that big. (The full credit card sized original SIM card size is dramatically oversized though)

I hate devices that have spring loaded microSD slots that practically launch the things when you remove them. The springs have way too much tension and shoot your microSD across the room once you push it in with your nail.

>MicroSD are so darn tiny, sometimes pretty hard to pick up.

This is true, but the idea is that you should almost never need to do this. It should be a rare occasion when you need to install or remove a microSD card. It's just like nanoSIM cards: when was the last time you needed to swap that out?

Floppy disks, and today USB thumb drives, serve a different purpose: they're supposed to be easy to plug and unplug and move data around. I don't see microSD cards as having that purpose at all. I have a microSD card in my phone, and it's great, but I haven't taken it out since I put it in there several years ago; it's just a storage expansion device, not a way of easily moving data between devices. It's not that easy to swap between devices, but it's easy enough to do, with some care, for those rare occasions it might be necessary (like migrating to a new phone).

Sony memory sticks were like that. Mini Disc as well a bit earlier. The main problem was Sony.

Yes, I really liked the memory stick and UMD formats. Too bad they were made by Sony and were thus uselessly crippled for any normal purposes.

You'd really think that Sony would have figured out that every single storage medium they've ever made has been an utter failure, but Sony is gonna Sony.

Sony: Look at this awesome new storage format! Everyone should use it!

Also Sony: No, not like that.

Sony's positioning in storage formats is just weird. They spend untold money developing media formats intending to recoup the development costs licensing those formats. Then make the licensing fees and conditions so onerous that no one is willing to license them. The only time anyone touches a Sony influenced format is when it's developed and licensed by a consortium.

> Sony's positioning in storage formats is just weird.

Case in point: Vita Memory Card. Superficially similar to Micro SD, and it even uses a similar electrical protocol... but it isn't compatible.

Sony has (or at least had; I haven't seen them try again for a while now) a long history of trying to push proprietary standards on everyone. They really seemed to think they could come up with some proprietary standard for something where other, more open, standards already existed, and people would somehow adopt theirs en masse.

It reminds me a lot of IBM when they introduced the PS/2 computers. They really, really thought that they could single-handedly kill all the PC "clones" by pushing their clunky, overpriced PC with a bunch of proprietary standards in it (namely the MCA bus). The people running these two companies had an extreme amount of arrogance and hubris.

I like my PS/2 and still use it occasionally when I really want to focus on my writing.

You'd really think that Sony would have figured out that every single storage medium they've ever made has been an utter failure, but Sony is gonna Sony.

This is a little funny in a thread about floppy disks, considering that the extremely popular and ubiquitous 3.5” Micro Floppy Disk was a Sony design ;)

There are also some other Sony formats that actually stuck, like DAT, Minidisc (yes, not so much in the US from what I gather, but it was A Thing in Europe, Australia and Japan) and Betacam.

Sony engineering and management are the two entities, with the second being the big problem.

Sure, how isn't that always the case? I mean, I've never heard of a company where the management was stellar but the engineering sucked.

CFexpress Type B cards (i.e. having the Sony XQD size) would be a perfect floppy disk replacement, except that these cards are overpriced and restricted to the niche of expensive photo cameras, instead of having a slot for them in any laptop and being available at the same price as the USB drives.

These cards are much sturdier than the SD cards, and much faster, due to the PCIe interface. If a laptop had a slot for them, they would have been much more convenient than external SSDs or USB drives, which protrude from the case or are hanging on cables.

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