"Jose" wrote in message
...
...plus the usual floppy drive
Why?

Despite their reported obsolescence, they are still exceedingly useful for
tranfer of small files from machine to machine, especially those without
USB connections and drivers for whatever brand of thumb somebody has.

Huh? All modern PCs have USB now (heck, any older computer still in use is
very likely to have a USB controller added). As far as drivers go, Windows
has the USB storage device drivers built in. You don't need drivers
specific to the make or model of a USB flash drive. USB is a fine solution,
and CD burners are nearly as ubiquitous. Blank CDs cost less than a floppy,
last time I checked (granted, that hasn't been recently), so if you really
want a viable alternative to USB for "sneaker-net", CDs make a lot more
sense than floppies.

Until I have a chance to try it for myself, I won't bother arguing the RAID
issue that Martin claims, except to say that my nearly-relevant experience
suggests he's wrong (and to explain why I say this).

I built a PC this summer that had a RAID controller on it with a RAID BIOS
setup utility built in. For sure, you didn't need Windows to be installed
to configure the array, and as near as I could tell, once you had the array
configured, Windows would detect it as a plain IDE drive, at least initially
while it was installing, so no extra RAID drivers were necessary. Obviously
once Windows was installed, with the RAID drivers installed, Windows will
handle the higher-level RAID features, such as error reporting and the like.
But I didn't see any sign at all that Windows needed any drivers just to
install.

At the time, I didn't bother to try configuring an array, but for sure
Windows installed onto a single hard drive attached to the RAID controller
without any trouble at all, and no need for a floppy drive.

I haven't bought a computer with a floppy drive in five years, and probably
haven't even used a floppy drive in three. A floppy drive is just a dust
collector these days.

Pete