I'd go with floppies, but I just like to use them over goteks. It's a matter of preference. Floppies are more original, and they, at least for me, add to the experience, while just being able to click away at your gotek just seems tacky to me.

I don't like the look gotek drives have as well. They seem out of place on an old PC. You can still buy NOS 3.5" floppy disks for cheap nowadays (old verbatim and sony ones are the best imo)

The problem with old floppy disk is managing to separate the good floppy disks from the bad ones. I've got like 7 sealed boxes of some brand (fujifilm IIRC) from the 2000's and each box I opened ended up having many floppy disks with bad sectors ... I also found many floppy disks destroying themselves in fdd making a circular mark on the disk. And of course this wasn't good for the heads either ... Though after some cleaning it's usually ok. If you find a floppy disk making a weird noise when it's just spinning, take it out as fast as you can and check if there's no circular mark. If there's one, put it in the dumpster right-away.
However I've seen that happening more with 5"1/4 disks than 3.5". I'm not saying that it will happen to you, it's just a piece of advice for that situation ^^. If you find 30 good NOS floppy disks you should be already good for anything.

On the other hand, to transfert large file you may be interested into doing some networking between old and new computers

Dealing with floppies is cumbersome. I still use floppies (got did of all but a couple some time ago, but then got into old hardware...), but mainly to install the OS and networking tools. You could also transfer data via CF...
I will get a GoTek someday, but I'm in no hurry to do so.

I like floppies for nostalgia reasons, but the Go-Tek for convenience and because of that I'm planning on putting it in all of my older PCs eventually.

This( attached ) is my AT&T PC I painted black and darker shades of beige the other year -- so probably blasphemy? -- and I like how it turned out as it gave it more of a retro look than the boring light-beige. And I like that the Go-Tek added an LED display.
( I bought a small 8-gig USB thumb drive that's a transparent-dark-brown to use with it and it fits nicely into the USB port. It always weirds me out when I see giant-thumb-sticks popping out of a Go-Tek. 😀 )

gotek
always gotek

im glad i dont have to format...copy..a floppy disc anymore
gotek is like the swiss army knife of my retro pc

I offer better choice. Ls-120 drive. It still reads floppys and you can use 120mb ls disks.

I have 2 goteks, one with 100 and one with 1000 slots, both are compatible with each other, and they work just fine.

But i also have a reserve of ca.40 floppy drives, 10 of them are black. And like 500 tested formatted floppies.
I even have ca.50 those oldschool blue 720kb disks, but i really do not have no real world use for them.
My computer collection and curiosity ends in a underclocked 486s.

I bought an HxC to use with an Amstrad CPC. While it's a very useful tool, that I used to quickly transfer and test disc images from a modern PC to the antique computer, I found myself liking using real floppies more. I took the steps to be able to transfer images directly to real discs, and I barely touched the HxC since then.

It turns out I prefer greatly having a real physical object in my hands rather than pressing buttons. It just feels more satisfying, a bit like having printed documentation that you can quickly grab and stroll through instead of a pdf. Swapping floppies can still be annoying, but the floppy emulator doesn't alleviate that, as you still need to press buttons to change between images.

It also helps keeping your collection in check, because you don't want to have hundreds of real floppies on your desk. You only make and keep those that are really relevant to you.

I am on the: "Use floppy disk and drive untill fail"-Team. When all my drives and disks are dead, I will go the floppy way.
Personally, I will only recommend floppy disks and drives, if they can be sourced for free, or extremely cheap.
Too old and unreliable these days, and if one does not have any drives and disks, then go for the Gotek solution.
It's the same on Amiga and C64 as well. Use floppy untill it dies. Then get some SD/USB drives instead.

Those HxC emulator are so wonderfully cheesy looking, but not in a cheap way! I want one for my Pentium 2/Athlon systems, but not at the price they're going for on eBay.

I still buy Floppies whenever I find them. 😀

Gotek, and if cd rom emulators exists i would go with that too.

I can see the need for a Gotek on an Amiga where you play mostly floppy disks bootable games, but for PC and Mac retro computing real floppies are the way to go.

Big fan of using floppies, but can definitely understand why people with a Gotek use them. Definitely a personal preference choice either way I think.

I asked because slowly my stack of floppies that i can write and rewrite is shinking, im down to 4 working disks at this point, its either buy a gotek or buy more disks 🤣

Can you run a floppy drive and a go-tek together so the go-tek could be associated with drive B:\?

21603 wrote:

Can you run a floppy drive and a go-tek together so the go-tek could be associated with drive B:\?

Yes, sure, just like any other floppy!

Cyberdyne wrote:

Yes, sure, just like any other floppy!

Cool. The best of both worlds. Do you get the go-tek floppy from ebay or some other more reputable dealer?

I have bought 2 of them from e-bay, it is the safest i think. But i am open for sugestions, where to buy those cheap chinese electronic stuff more cheaper.

candle_86 wrote:

I asked because slowly my stack of floppies that i can write and rewrite is shinking, im down to 4 working disks at this point, its either buy a gotek or buy more disks 🤣

If bad sectors are appearing, try to low format them, that's usually demagnetisation doing this or just dust that made some sector unavailable at one moment. Clean the drive as well