For a modern personal/gaming/home build... no. When putting together systems for businesses that are behind the times/computer illiterate... maybe. I'm putting together a budget list for a local law firm. I might have to include a floppy and dial up modem.
I don't have one in my computer and the only reason the family computer has one was because it was free when they had the guy build it (they didn't trust me enough to have me do it for them) So no
As everyone else said: no. The times where you'd use boot floppies when your system's crapped itself are over. There are a lot of CD options out there, whether it be Microsoft's rescue stuff, GNU/Linux live CDs or other general, mostly Windows-oriented boot CDs. There are simply a lot of CD or DVD boot options. Only one of my three PCs supports booting from USB (I don't need new hardware so it's difficult to justify the expense), and I have removed the floppies from those that don't - for esthetical reasons. And because, if anything ever happened that warrented an unexpected system recovery/drive rescue, I know I'd be able to boot from a CD or DVD. Floppy drives may be very cheap nowadays, but in my opinion the expense of time spent placing it or the trade-off of usability versus an esthetically more pleasing exterior doesn't justify having one; purely because one CD/DVD drive will do the same trick whilst serving you in many other ways.
It's not necessary, but I think it's nice to have. Especially since floppy disk drives cost next to nothing. As for floppy seek, that can be disabled in BIOS. Perhaps a USB-connected FDD?
The only use for floppies that I see is firmware flashing -- and that's for old stuff aswell. Not needed anymore nowadays. BIOSes can be flashed from USB sticks, DVD drives can be flashed from Windows, etc...
I just keep a floppy drive, Molex-to-floppy-power adapter cable and a floppy cable in a box. The only time it gets brought out is when I need SATA drivers for Windows XP, but I'd never boher building a drive into a PC. And I'll be upgrading my last XP box in a couple of years (long upgrade cycles FT...L...W? I'm not sure anymore) so I'll keep my FDD until then!
You know, back in 2003 when I was in Year 9 in high school, a girl came to school without her homework. The teacher asked her why, and she said printer broke/out of ink (typical story). Then he asked why she didn't just bring her work in on a floppy, and her answer was that 'her computer was too advanced for floppy disks'. Now seriously, the whole class cracked up, teacher included. Obviously she was full of it, but who knew six years down the track it'd be true? tl;dr No, you don't need a floppy. Maybe for BIOS updates, but that'd be it.
why? i built my first computer in 03 and i didn't put a floppy in it. i've also still got a couple laptops from that era and none of them have floppys.
USB drives weren't that popular back then, at least not in Australia. At school, a lot of people carried floppy disks in their blazer pockets.
What a bunch of backward folk you are down there. No, floppy's aren't needed. Any mobo worth having has a USB-supported BIOS update feature.
