China DOS Union

Floppy disks can be considered the most expensive storage medium, and their capacity is very limited, the storage life is rather short too, so in my view it's time for floppies to exit the stage of history. Floppy disk images may still be around for a while, because their images are still needed when booting from a CD-ROM. My machine doesn't even have a floppy drive.

If your motherboard BIOS supports booting from a USB flash drive!
Then you don't need a floppy disk!

Floppy disks will withdraw sooner or later; the reason we still use them now is because we still need them to read old materials.
Hard disks will also withdraw sooner or later. The future world will gradually belong to RAM disks, USB drives, flash drives, X drives, XX drives, ? drives.

Hard disks not quite to that extent, right! But they will gradually evolve...

The reason floppy disks still exist is their universality: no matter what computer, no matter what class, it supports floppy disks and can boot the computer from them.
USB flash drives can't replace floppy drives anytime soon. Machines that support USB boot are generally 845-class or equivalent computers; even 815 doesn't support it. If you want to wait until 815 is completely eliminated, you'll still have to wait quite a while.

I definitely won't. Cheap floppy disks are only 1.5 yuan each now, about one yuan per megabyte. Flash drives right now are at least two yuan per megabyte, so until they drop to an ideal price, I won't use flash drives.
BTW, webmaster, can the font in reply posts be changed to SimSun? It's almost impossible to read, I'm really not used to it!

The following is a quote from wyl at 2003-5-31 21:49:55:
BTW, webmaster, can the font in reply posts be changed to SimSun? It's almost impossible to read, I'm really not used to it!

The reply font is set by yourself. The default is SimSun!

1.5-yuan floppy disks? Around here, floppies cost at least 4-5 yuan.

Floppy disks come in high, medium, and low grades. In Guangzhou, large quantities of no-name disks are very cheap; our school bought some before for 0.6 yuan each. I've personally used Gree disks for many years. One box has 10 disks, each individually packed, about 32 yuan total, and they basically last about a year.

Ah, so the quality of 1.44MB floppy disks actually differs too?

Counterfeits are everywhere now. In Zhongguancun, a box of SONY floppy disks with phone-number/code anti-counterfeit labels costs 45 yuan, yet they still feel fake when used. Usually they die after only being formatted a few times. I really want to ask what brand of floppy disks KV300 uses; even if they're 5 yuan each, at least they won't hold things up.

Of course. Good ones can be used for two years without going bad, but bad ones not only break after just a few uses, they can even damage the floppy drive!!!

China is a major disk-producing country; output is even greater than world demand. Many manufacturers can only turn to passing things off as famous brands in order to get bigger profits. So I generally buy Gree; if you want somewhat better quality, you can consider Jintian. I generally don't buy "name-brand disks" like SONY, because there are too many fakes.
The best floppy disks I've used were KAO Kao, and I had a few that lasted almost 5 years, though of course I didn't use them very often.

Of course. Good ones may last two years without going bad, but poor-quality ones... maybe they'll break after just a few uses, and can even damage the floppy drive.

How you use them is very important too!
For example, using HD－COPY2.0a to read and write floppy disks.
That will greatly increase their lifespan!