The comment section is wild. So many people thinking that the Japanese government is somehow late to the floppy free party. Clearly they have no idea how dire the IT infrastructure situation is for the most critical systems of the world’s major super powers
If you think the US government is floppy free, let alone capable of going floppy free in the next 5 years, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya
US gov isn’t even tape free
Tape makes an excellent, dirt cheap, large scale backup solution. You can get a 30 TB tape for 45 bucks.
Wish smaller scale tape storage was more viable for home use (homelab scale). Would love to have tapes instead of spinning drives for something like a home media server.
Last time I looked into it I didn’t even know where to start. Is it more feasible now? I’d imagine power consumption would also be better than keeping disks spinning all the time.
The tape drives I found were really expensive. But as others mentioned, it’s not really suitable for media anyway. Only cold storage backup.
If it works well for the job that it’s tasked to perform, why change it? It’s got the added benefit of being an unintentional security feature now too, as very few others will even have a drive for reading them. Sort of like how manual transmissions are much less likely to be stolen now.
On the other hand, if you use an old technology that isn’t being mass produced anymore, it can reach a point where it will become a big liability for a mission-critical piece of equipment.
Yah this is bad I run a cnc plasma table, big table 10 feet x 20 feet. It uses floppy disks. Pain in the ass to find a new drive and pain in the ass to find new disks because constant write re write emf and metal dust kills them. But despite that it’s still cheaper and easier than a $15k retro fit to a more modern controler.
If it works well for the job
Your example is one where it clearly isn’t a great fit for the job. If you wanted to transfer sensitive data discretely, a floppy could be significantly better than a wired network where you’ve got to worry about America/Russia/China/Israel/Iran and who knows who else peeping on the transfer, or a USB drive which is already known to be compromised by stuxnet derivatives.
