ISU students may have noticed the lack of floppy drives in new campus computers this year.

The 3 1/4-inch disks slowly but surely have become obsolete, said Frank Poduska, assistant director of Academic Information Technologies.

In new campus computer labs, only computers with CD and DVD drives are being added, Poduska said.

In older labs, floppy drives will not be included when the systems are replaced.

Floppy disks don’t hold nearly as much information as other forms of memory devices. The floppies have only 1.44 megabytes of space, while CDs store more than 700 megabytes, and newer flash drives can store anywhere from 64 megabytes to 1 gigabyte of information.

“Even Zip disks can hold 100 times as much as a single floppy,” Poduska said.

Zip disks are still fairly common, but many computers don’t come with Zip disk drives either, Poduska said. CDs are more widely used for information storage, he said.

“Probably I have several hundred sitting at home,” said Aaron Hurd, senior in computer engineering. “They’re slow. They degrade easily. Eventually I’m going to throw them out, but I just keep them around so that if I ever need to use one, I can just grab it.”

In a computer, disk drives have motors that spin a disk in order to read it and save information onto it.

A computer with a floppy disk drive costs more than a computer without one because of the extra components needed to read the disks, Poduska said.

“Everyone thought Apple was crazy when they removed the floppy drive from their iMac,” Hurd said. “Now who uses them?”

Even more computer companies are removing the floppy disk drive from their computers now that fewer people are using floppy disks.

“There’s a big move away from rotating media, things with drives, to memory stick devices,” Poduska said.

“Manufacturers are seeing it as a way to reduce costs.”

Jordan Jump, senior in computer engineering, said he doesn’t even use external storage devices anymore.

“I actually just put it all on the network,” Jump said.

“Probably the easiest way is to e-mail it to yourself and access it through WebMail and then download it from there.”

Daniela Dimitrova, assistant professor of journalism and communication and new media technologies researcher, said the floppy disk will not be the only storage device that will become obsolete. Zip disks and maybe even CDs will follow soon afterwards, to be replaced by smaller devices with higher memory capacity, she said.

“The most likely innovation to replace the floppy disk is the so-called flash or USB drive,” Dimitrova said. “I recently bought a flash drive for less than $60 which holds up to 256 megabytes.”