No, the floppy disk is not dead
My staging servers cannot boot from CD-ROM, therefore I use a boot disk. For this reason alone, I have floppy drives in all my systems. I also save time by booting from floppy disk and installing operating systems over the network. A tip for anyone who’s looking to become RHCE certified: install RHEL using a network connection because it’s much, much faster than installing via CD and it saves precious time during your performance based exam.
How does this impact the security of your systems? How does this affect available network bandwidth? Ideally, we don’t want to introduce more entry points into our systems than we need, be it via USB drive, floppy, or CD-ROM. Which do you prefer, or do you even care?
I don’t use floppy drives other than on servers. I really like the permanency of cd and I tend to burn data cds regularly. But nothing beats a USB drive for just moving data here and there from systems or making it portable for my backpack and a laptop or two. I love the reusability and small size.