When I was putting together my new PC, a friend of mine had a bag of old floppy drives laying around. I tried them all out to see which I liked the best and to make sure it worked. Well, I came across one of them that was really nice. It didn't have that big click when inserting or ejecting. The disk just slid in softly. And I was worried at first if it was even working because I couldn't even hear the thing. I don't know the brand off had. It might not even be labeled. But it's the best floppy drive I've ever used. Only problem was it was an ugly dark tan color. But I was painting everything anyways, so it didn't matter much.

Not that it's used much, but on occasion I need to use a floppy. I was just wondering if anyone has ever considered a "quiet floppy"? I'll see if I can find a make/model or anything on it if anyone is interested.

usb thumb drive thingy maybe better

Sure, I'll bite. What kind is it?

I actually just had a floppy problem in one of my systems-- I'm not sure if I've got a bad floppy controller on the motherboard or three bad floppy drives. But testing amongst the floppy drives I had lying around, I found that the quietest (and also the bulkiest) was an old one that I had pulled from a Pentium Pro system. Maybe the thicker metal on it reduces vibrations from the metal shell around the drive?

As I write this on my Powerbook G3, I can't help but think that maybe Apple was right to banish floppy drives to oblivion. On an unrelated note, does anyone know if modern day BIOSes that will boot from a USB device can boot from USB floppies? And will DOS treat the floppy like a regular old A: drive? Perhaps through some sort of floppy emulation trick like with making bootable CDs?

I've tested and used Mitsumi, Teac, NEC, Sony and Panasonic FDDs during the last year. BY FAR the Sonys' are the qietest FDDs, followed by the NECs. The Sony FDDs are quieter while they're loading and quieter in operation too. They're usually $2-3 more expensive than a TEAC or Mitsumi but well worth it, if you ask me. I use them in all my builds.

I have had pretty good luck with Samsung Drives...very quiet and fast. Check out Newegg for some comments http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.a ... 14&order=1[url]

The ultimate solution for noisy floppy drives: throw it out the trash! I haven't used one in years and years.
As for quiet ones .. the one in my old Compaq was pretty silent. And yes, NEC' are about as silent as they can be.

Ah ha, it's a TEAC model FD-235HF. I didn't notice the little label on the back until just now. So it sounds like there are a number of different brand of floppies that are quiet. I had just never noticed until this one. Thanks.

put a drivebay cover in it's place much quieter. floppy disks are DEAD

in my case, i've had a teac floppy drive (w/ my 1.4 athlon system) that was VERY loud, and i've had a teac from an old 386 (?!?!?) Packard Bell Xcel that was VERY quiet. i don't have the exact model numbers with the teac floppy drives, but I would DEFINITELY recommend the Mitsumi floppy drive that is sold by Newegg.com. I have one in my current P4 system, and it runs fairly quiet (probably quietest that i've heard).

Floppy disks aren't dead!

You would think this guy never had to reinstall XP from floppies...

erm... why not use the CD?

My floppy drive is completely silent! its inside a box in my closet

Exactly how many floppies would that be?

Actually I'm pretty sure MS stopped making floppy copies of OS's after Windows98. And that disk set was 68 floppies!!!

SP1 for for XP would be nearly 100 floppies alone!

Yeah, i know floppies are dead. But I do still use them for boot disks on ocassion. For some reason I don't seem to be able to boot off any CD on my Dell XPS-266. Then I've played around with FreeDos. Again, I couldn't get the CD to boot correctly so I had to install from floppy. I don't think my old Win 95 CDs are bootable. Then there's my Gateway Handbook 2000 that I didn't have a floppy drive for and I messed up the boot files on it. That thing was sitting dead in my closet for many years until I finally got a floppy drive for it from eBay. As you're only option to boot besides the HD is the proprietary floppy.

So, my point is that floppies are still needed. Especially when you are still playing around with older systems and stuff.

This machine uses a non-bootable CDRW drive as the primary optical drive. The backup CD drive, which can't read CDR disks, is no longer bootable either.

If you are stuck in the same situation, you can go to Microsoft's website and download the six floppies required to boot a recovery OS that can run the installer from CD or can restore XP to a previous state. These six floppies seen to have problems about half of the time, and any time there is a problem you have to reboot using all 6 floppies. If you want to go back and choose another option, you have to reboot using all 6 floppies. If you have one of Microsoft's legendary programming errors, you have to reboot using all 6 floppies.

So no, it's not as cool as a 100 floppy install. But it will let you install XP if you can't boot from a CD, but have one.