forgot how slow USB2 is

Got some USB 2 flash drives from Amazon, 23GB integral, they are cheap and mainly only going to be used for files.
Anyway, I made a Windows 10 installation on one using Rufus, oh boy did it take a long time

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Got some USB 2 flash drives from Amazon, 23GB integral, they are cheap and mainly only going to be used for files.
Anyway, I made a Windows 10 installation on one using Rufus, oh boy did it take a long time

😂😂😂😂😂😂

i know that times are tough with nand but yikes

For files USB2 is fine for the most part and installing Windows from USB2 did not take that long to be honest.

3x32GB drives for a tenner.

I boot a USB2 drive once a week to backup an old Linux machine and boy does it take 5 minutes to boot to desktop on the pen drive.

Optical disk is slower, I tried to install Windows via Blu-ray, LOL, that was fun.
Yet, that is what we used to do, before i had a PC they used floppies,

I remember feeding my first PC with Windows 3.1 floppies to install it.

My first installation of OS/2 came on 3.5" floppies... 23 of 'em

The experience is burnt into my memory

Same here. Not helped by the PC having its Reset button bang next to the Disk Eject button which meant a couple of start-overs!

Oh dear, what a silly place to put a reset button.

I never installed Windows via floppy, I had to use a floppy to start the machine off and then installed the rest via CD, but that was it.,
Installed Amiga operating system via Floppy, but that is different.

The only problem I have with these flash drives is the colour of one of them is pink , oh and the case is not great, I don't think they would take too much rough handling, I thought with the connector being metal they would be a bit more robust.
They will do what I want.

In reply to a post by billford:

My first installation of OS/2 came on 3.5" floppies... 23 of 'em

The experience is burnt into my memory

I was thinking to post similar, but I couldn't remember how many floppies, so it obviously was not burnt so deeply into my memory.

None of that palaver with the first PC I used at work - ACT Sirius (with 128kB of memory IIRC) in about 1982. 2 x 5.25 inch floppy drive and no hard disk. Turn on the machine, put the MS-DOS or CP/M disk into one drive to load the OS, take out that disk, put in the disk with your program on and the disk with your data into the other drive, command line to start the program and off you go.

Taught me the benefits of backing up very early in the piece when I wiped a floppy that contained several weeks of data.

My first PC was the Amstrad 1512, only had 5-1/4" floppies, reinstaling Windows back then was a nightmare 🤕dial-up internet was just as fun, the youngsters these days don't know what they missed 🤣🤣

I remember the Amstrad, had a strange size disk, I have one here, not sure where it came from. I think it's something to do with my brother when he was some training thing many years ago.
I don't even know if it came from a PC or a PCW.

I would love to have space and time to muck around old computers.

The 5-1/4" floppy was common back then, it's where the name Floppy came from because they were so thin they just flopped around. I think it took a year at least before the hard cased 3-1/2" one came into being along with CD drives being added.

Not forgetting the even larger and floppier original 8 inch disk.

Hahaha, yes but they were only used in organisations, I never actually came across any when working with GPO International Telecommunications or when I was working with Teleprinters (Telex)

Quite a few hobby computers, eg the Altair 8800, used 8 inch floppy disks in the early days. That was before 5 1/4" disks were invented.

I had many a person ask me why a 3.5" disc was called "floppy". I took great joy in ripping them apart to show them that the disc inside the hard case was indeed "floppy". It was the storage medium itself that was floppy, the case was just for protection and went from flexible to rigid.

And then if you can show them the platters in an old hard drive then it reinforces why one is called floppy and the other hard.

Mine was a 1640 and it didn't have a hard drive at all so there was no "install windows" - everything ran from floppy disc.

Working on setting up PCs for a reasonably large business you could spend many hours with a load of PCs setup and just feeding floppy discs in to install DOS, drivers, Windows, Office applications (back then Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect) and the like. Had production lines and you would just start at one end and just cycle the discs down the line as the next disc was needed for each machine.

Those were the days.

That's why I called it hard cased, and yes I have taken them apart and a HDD as well, the latter to destroy the platters

The only thing I had before the 1512 was a 48K speccy and the later +3 model

I started with a Compukit build-it-yourself (real build-it-yourself) computer. Learned a lot about soldering!

… and if you’ve ever seen the result of an IBM “washing machine” Winchester disk failing you’ll know why they call it “crashing”.

I am pleased to say they were not something I ever had to deal with.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

… and if you’ve ever seen the result of an IBM “washing machine” Winchester disk failing you’ll know why they call it “crashing”.

But not as much damage as a Univac Fastrand drum breaking loose from its bearings and flying across rhe room and smashing through walls!

In reply to a post by The_Voyager:

The 5-1/4" floppy was common back then, it's where the name Floppy came from because they were so thin they just flopped around. I think it took a year at least before the hard cased 3-1/2" one came into being along with CD drives being added.

I am cracking up, no idea why i said that, yes, you are correct, I was thinking of the 3 inch disks
https://disktransfer.co.uk/IMAGES-fs/Amstrad-3-flopp...

I knew 5 and a quarter ones were around, I had them on my CBM64

Just ignore me, must be tired.

LOL, we all get tired like that at times

In reply to a post by The_Voyager:

The 5-1/4" floppy was common back then, it's where the name Floppy came from because they were so thin they just flopped around. I think it took a year at least before the hard cased 3-1/2" one came into being along with CD drives being added.

The 8 inch ones were much floppier... the 5 and a quarter were same just smaller. Then you had Amstrad who used the 3 inch in their word processor and CP/M machines and then the CPC and Spectrum +3, but it was the Sony created 3.5" that became the popular size. UK saw first in Amiga and Atari ST but globally it was the Macintosh that made the format popular.

For our younger readers, USB 3 was released in 2008 and so people selling USB 2 only sticks are to be avoided, as USB 3 is pretty old now at 18 years!

Steve Gibson's free utility Validrive is worth running on any USB stick given the amount of fake and cheating going on in the supply chains.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

Useful little Tool, confirmed my thoughts about a 1 year old 4TB USB drive that I got for not much money from Amazon as being a Fake, all my other 250GB upto 1TB USB drives were all good, didn't bother testing my much smaller pen drives >100GB.

Yes, I went through all my drives, and all mine validated, but those that took a very very long time to validate I put in a bag as "stop using". I assume either poor quality NAND or a very poor controller.

What to do with a drawer full of floppies I have accumulated. Nothing to read them on unless I get a USB floppy.

...and like me you probably have a drawer full of out of date cables which you'll probably never use again, I know I really need to declutter, maybe sometime before I kick the proverbial 🤣

In reply to a post by The_Voyager:

...and like me you probably have a drawer full of out of date cables which you'll probably never use again, I know I really need to declutter, maybe sometime before I kick the proverbial 🤣

Me too, on the shelf behind me, certainly need to be sorted, also got memory that is out of date, but I don't want to chuck them, just in case someone wants them. There are people that still collects old machines.

In reply to a post by Banger:

What to do with a drawer full of floppies I have accumulated. Nothing to read them on unless I get a USB floppy.

They are history. One of my PCs that can't run Win11 has a 3.5" floppy drive, but I've never used it. Somewhere I have a USB 3.5" floppy drive, but its USB 1.1 speed

Magnetic floppy disks don't last forever, neither do USB drives. If anything you want, work out how to get it transferred. There are companies that do this, as they did VHS to DVD conversion.

I had loads, things like "Laplink" seral cables, DB9/DB25 to DB9/DB25 and then Parallel port ZIP drives etc. Now I just seem to have loads of short Ethernet cables where the RJ45 plug has a broken clip!

In reply to a post by jchamier:

They are history. One of my PCs that can't run Win11 has a 3.5" floppy drive, but I've never used it. Somewhere I have a USB 3.5" floppy drive, but its USB 1.1 speed

My old Core 2 Duo machine has a floppy but since I changed PSU there is no power connector for it as modern PSUs dropped it.

You can get a suitable adapter for about £3.

So you can

Doh found 2 in my box of spares - floppy now working.

Edited by Banger (Sun 22-Mar-26 17:33:51)