Floppy Drive

Though generally not needed, floppy drives are often installed anyway. Floppy drives havebeen made obsolete in recent years by devices such as USB "Thumb Drives" and CD writers.Floppy drives are sometimes required for BIOS updates and exchanging small files with oldercomputers. Floppy drives block air movement with wide cables, and can make computers set tocheck the drive take longer to start (most have an option in their bios to disable this.) Thedrives and disks are also notoriously unreliable. One option to overcome the cable problem andto make it easier to install is to buy an external USB floppy drive.


These are potentially a littlebit faster and can be plugged into a different system (such as a laptop without a floppy drive.)However, not all systems support booting from a USB floppy drive -- most notably oldermotherboards. Most newer systems do now though. A USB floppy drive is considerably moreexpensive and since floppy drives are not needed much anymore, this is rarely a useful option.You can easily get a thumb drive holding more than 50 times as much as one floppy disk forthe same price as a USB floppy drive.