Floppies head out of favor in a flash

By Joe Johnson
The Collegian

Students are discovering that floppy disks may no longer be the safest way to store assignments right before a deadline.

“I went to the student union to print out my document,” former student David Martinez said, “but it wouldn’t work. Something zapped my disk, I guess, and I had to race home to find another way to get it. It was a mess.”

Floppy disks have been a popular method of storing and moving computer files since the early 1980s.

“The nice thing about floppy disks was that, because they were so cheap, you could manage your materials better,” Marilyn Zitterkopf, a library technical services staff member, said. “You could keep the disks in a Rolodex, each with a different kind of document, and your materials would be organized.

That way, if you lost one, you didn’t lose everything.”

At Fresno State, however, these disks are slowly becoming a problem.

At the Henry Madden Library, representatives of the Reference department estimate that half of the students who use floppy disks run into problems with compatibility.

Many computer manufacturers no longer even support these drives, due to how easily they can be damaged.

Instead, students are beginning to discover the usefulness of the Universal Serial Bus, or USB, flash drive.

A USB flash drive, also known as a “thumb” or “jump” drive, is a small circuit board wrapped in plastic that can connect to any type of computer, be it Macintosh, PC or other, without the need for special components. These drives can hold anywhere from a few documents to the same amount of data as a DVD.

Flash drives are also becoming cost-effective investments for many students.

“We always have sales on flash drives,” Best Buy employee Zack Reese said. “It is very hard not to find one for $20 or less. There are several different brands out there, so not a single week goes by where we don’t run a promotion on one of them. Even outside of Best Buy, I always see them in Sunday newspapers going really cheap.”

But, according to Reese, flash drives aren’t the only way people can conveniently store their school files.

“One idea that most people don’t realize of is that you can use an MP3 player instead of a USB drive,” Reese said. “A 30 gigabyte iPod doesn’t just have to hold songs. You can also use it as a backup for your computer, so long as you don’t have a ton of stuff to save.”

“If you are going to spend $200 on a music device, you might as well save $20 more and use it to store your stuff for school and work,” Reese said. “Honestly, not a lot of people do it, but the option is there and it makes sense to use it. If you have an iPod, you can even access your documents and read them right on the screen. This is great if you import your To-Do list onto it. Then it becomes more like a little PDA.”

For those students that aren’t ready to take the plunge with this technology, though, there are still other ways to get around the floppy disk problem.

“You can always just e-mail a document to yourself,” said Miles Hernandez, a student assistant at the library. “It surprises me that more people don’t do this more often. Just attach a document to your e-mail and send it to your campus account. Almost any computer on campus can open it and you never have to worry that it will get corrupted.”

However, if this doesn’t work, Paul Priebe, a staff member of the library reference department, has a surefire solution for all students.

“The technology is always going to be frustrating,” Priebe said. “The best way to get around it is just to stick with the typewriter. That’ll never give you an error, but you might get ink all over the place.”

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