I'm finally retiring my floppy disk drive.

December 16th, 2017 marks the last day my Mitsumi D359M3 3.5 floppy disk drive was installed in my aging desktop computer.  I want to think that even when I purchased it in the early 2000s I was still having some use for it, but I probably wasn't except for the occasional testing of some sort of disk controller driver used during Windows XP setup. The floppy drive has been officially discontinued as of 2010, but hardware like this has been a staple of my early computing memories so I've been hesitant to let it go- "just in case".  

In the late 90s and early 2000s, floppy drives actually had transfer speed differences but most people never seemed to pay attention to that. And I'm not referring to the SuperDisk models that appeared in the latter years. Some had higher transfer rates than others and I'd like to think I had that in mind when I bought that specific model. But what did it matter when your maximum theoretical transfer rate was about 120KB/sec?

To further justify my urge to keep this drive around, I vaguely remember using it in 2009 or so needing it do a BIOS update on my P45 motherboard or some older laptop. But possibly since before 2009, it had not been in use. I held on to my Win95/98SE boot disk drives and MSCDEX drivers out of nostalgia, but those aren't necessary any longer. But couldn't I have just used an external USB floppy if needed? No, that's cheating! 

Unfortunately the hand-me-down motherboard (made in 2011) given to me by my brother does not have a floppy header. It must go. 

No more buzzing and whirring as next to the hard disk drive and DVD/BR optical drive, it's one of the last pieces from the mechanical era of computing.