What is the replacement of the floppy

While CD (and to an lesser extend DVD) disks have reached the price-point of the floppy, they have one significant downside, it is WORM (Write-Once Read-Many) media, allowing it to be used only one single time, and you need to be explicit in writing the data to the actual media (you need to burn it.)

While CD-RW solves the "use only once" problem, it is still EWORM (Erasable Write-Once Read-Many) media, which still means you need to be explicit in writing the data to the actual media (you still need to burn it.), and also, you still need to be very explicit in erasing it. (simple delete is not possible.)

Okay, we can use a CD-RW in Packet Writing mode, however the downside to that, is that this mode is not very universal, and also, not the native mode of the media.

Now, while USB-sticks and SD-cards may not have the poblems of the CD, they have a whole other kind of problem: their PRICE! USB-sticks and SD cards are generally 10 to 100 times as expensive as diskettes per piece.

SD-cards, in addition have an added problem, because they need a reader to operate. While it is a very standard thing, it is not default equipment on the computer like the CD drive or USB port (or historically the diskette drive).

You wouldn't give out an USB stick or SD card with a 100 kB text file, not caring weither you would get it back or not.

So, to recap:

• CD & DVD are basically WORM media.
• SD cards and USB sticks are relatively expensive.
• SD cards also needs special readers.
• Diskettes have a very low data-rate
• Diskettes have a very low storage capacity.

Now, is there a media out there that solves all these problems, or is there a way to get (very) small USB sticks or SD cards for a very low price (as they're the closest thing to diskette).

Solution 1:

The Internet.

• Can read/write any number of times
• Every computer I've seen in the past five years has either Wi-Fi built-in, or is a big workstation/server that's parked somewhere with a gigabit-or-better Ethernet cable sticking out the back
• There's no limit to how much data you can put on the Internet
• The data-rate limit of the Internet basically comes down to how much you want to pay, but even a consumer home Internet connection is enough to play realtime HD video already
• It's as ubiquitous today as the floppy was 15 years ago, and nothing else is

It even solves some problems that floppies had:

• It's easy to share with almost any number of people simultaneously, while you had to make one floppy for each person.
• There are collaboration tools for many types of documents, so instead of "save, sneakernet, load, edit, save, sneakernet, manual merge", you can often just have multiple people editing the actual data
• It takes up no space (I suppose technically the network adapter takes up some tiny amount of space, but your computer wouldn't be noticeably smaller or lighter without it).
• It's useful for a lot of things other than just a small transfer of data between people at nearby different computers (AFAIK, nobody ever wrote something like SuperUser.com that worked by passing floppies)
• You know right away if a transfer succeeded (and it almost always does), instead of sending a floppy through the mail and finding out later that it doesn't work.
• You don't have to worry about someone not being able to read the low-level format, filesystem, etc. with their particular model of floppy drive and version of OS, and there are even open-source programs to read almost any file format around.

Solution 2:

There is a fallacy in your argument. You are comparing per piece prices when you should really be comparing price/MB. For example, a 1.44 MB floppy disk at Staples is $6.49/box of 10 or $0.45/MB. A spindle of CD-R (50 pieces) is 39.99/spindle or about 1/10 of a cent per MB. A 2 GB thumb drive is currently $12.99/piece or about 7/10 of a cent per MB. In reality the floppy disk is the more expensive storage solution.

The nice thing about the thumb drive is that differences in head placement or positioning will not effect the read operation. Those of us who have been around for a while will remember that one machine where the heads were just a bit off and would never read a floppy formatted on a different machine.

All price data from Staples.com as of April 30, 2010.