Sony kills off the floppy disk

Floppy disks

Sony is to bid a final farewell to the 3.5in floppy disk and will be ceasing manufacturing as of March 2011.

The company put a stop to the disk's international sales last month but has now confirmed it will be cutting it off in its home territory of Japan as well.

Sony began making the classic storage devices back in 1981 to replace the larger 5.25in models and it soon became the dominant force in the market.

However, floppy disks have been steadily dropping out of the market for some time now with sales falling from 47 million in 2000 to just 8.5 million last year.

The format can no longer compete against the likes of CDs and USB flash drives which offer a lot more storage for a smaller price tag.

Although the end of an era, most PC manufacturers have dropped floppy disk drives from their products with Apple leading the way in 1998 and Dell following suit in 2003. HP only stopped installing the drives on its business desktops last year.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.