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In the age of Blue rays, Flash drives,etc do you think that still is there any need of floppy drives in systems which has very limited storage? Justify. Do you still use floppy drives? Does it has any advantage over CD/DVD, flash drives, tape drives?
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Ashish,
For new systems floppy drives is no longer needed. Consider that you can FTP files to a server that physically sits on the other side of the world, and have someone pull those files down, faster than you can copy the files to a floppy and walk them across the hall.
As others have already stated they are needed for reading legacy files that may be found from time to time on floppy disks.
However, a couple of points to make regarding floppy disks is that their media will degrade over time and become inaccessible, so content stored on those disks will be lost forever. So if you have libraries of floppy disks just laying around, you should begin the process of migrating those files onto another disk.
Next, area to deal with is accessing the actual content. If you have data stored on floppy disks, there is a good chance that the data stored on those disks is old and not easily viewable with current day applications. In other words you may need the originating applications running on their supported operating systems to access the content.
For example, even if you successfully copy files off of this old media, what's the point if you can’t open the files to access the content. Take an example of a floppy containing a few Wordperfect v4.2, Multimate v2, Harvard Graphics v2 files.
If you don't have these applications running on an early version of DOS to read the content, you still have a problem. Finding viewers or conversion utilities would be the next sequence in order to read the content. It's not a simple problem.
ALso, note that even Flash drives have a similar problem in that the number of read/writes is finite, not infinite.
Good Luck,
Peter
December 2008