Floppy disks terminated after Sony stops production



No comparison: CDs and USB sticks hold far more data than floppy disks

Floppy disks, which once littered home offices around the country are finally heading to the great electronics scrapyard in the sky.



Sony, the largest manufacturer of the 3.5" storage devices, have announced they will stop making them in March next year - 30 years after they started selling them.



They made the decision after domestic disk sales in Japan crashed from 47million in 2002 to 12 million in 2009. Sony had already withdrawn them from many international markets.



First launched by IBM in 1971, floppy disks were an unwieldy eight inches across and could only hold 80KB of information - a tiny fraction of one megabyte.



They developed alongside the burgeoning home computer market. By the early eighties they had reduced in size to 5.25 inches and held 720KB. Sony claims to have sold the first 3.5inch floppy in 1981.



The popularity of USB flash drives, CDs and other storage devices have now made the floppy disk obsolete. The maximum storage of a floppy is two megabytes, which is 4,000 times less than the eight gigabytes customers can buy on a USB stick.

It has been a long drawn out death for the home office friend. In 2003, Dell stopped including floppy drives on their standard home computers. By 2007 PC World had also stopped selling the disks.

Evolution: Despite evolving to a more manageable size, floppy disks have reached the end of the road



