When did the last factory line shut down?
Sony was the last major manufacturer, and it quit in stages. The company announced in April 2010 that it would end domestic sales of the 3.5-inch disk that year and stop production by March 2011, closing out about three decades of mass manufacturing.
The sales numbers explain the decision. Sony held about 70 percent of Japan's floppy disk market and sold 12 million disks in fiscal 2009, down from a record 47 million in fiscal 2002, eWeek reported in 2010, citing the Mainichi Daily News. A 70 percent share of almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Rival makers had already pulled out before Sony did, and when the Sony line stopped, no plant anywhere picked the format back up. By 2010 most of what Sony still shipped was going to developing countries and to India rather than to offices in the United States or Britain.
That is the part people miss when they ask whether floppy disks are still made. The answer has been no for more than fifteen years, and every disk sold since is stock manufactured before 2011.
Who still sells floppy disks in 2026?
Resellers do, and the best known is floppydisk.com, run by Tom Persky out of a warehouse in Lake Forest, California. Reuters visited in 2022 and found shelves of green, orange, blue, yellow and black diskettes shipped in from around the world.
The model is simple: buy what is left, wipe it, relabel it, sell it. Reuters reported in 2022 that Persky was moving about 500 disks a day with no manufacturer to restock from. The Hustle reported in 2023 that floppydisk.com charges about $1 for a 3.5-inch disk.
A dollar a disk is scarcity pricing on a finite pile rather than a collector's premium. Stock also arrives from the other direction, from people and companies who mail in the disks they turn up when they clear out a storage room, which is how a seller with no supplier stays in business at all.
Where to find floppy disks today: loose disks, labeled boxes and sealed 1990s packs all circulate second-hand, with unopened new old stock carrying a premium and 5.25-inch and 8-inch disks costing more again. The deepest supply of desk-drawer stock is on Etsy's floppy disk listings, where sellers break up old office boxes by the lot.
Which machines still need a floppy drive?
The buyers are not nostalgists. They are factories, embroidery shops and aircraft maintenance crews running equipment built when a floppy drive was the sensible way to get a file into a machine.
Embroidery is the biggest single category. Commercial embroidery machines load stitch patterns from disk, they cost real money to replace, and a machine that still sews correctly is not going to be scrapped over a file format. CNC machine tools, textile looms and test instruments sit in the same position.
Aviation is the other large one. "You would use a floppy disk to get information in and out of some of the avionics of that airplane," Persky told Reuters in 2022, describing aircraft designed 20, 30 or even 40 years ago that are still flying and still need their databases updated.
The logic repeats everywhere the format shows up. A machine tool or a ship system built for a 40-year service life outlives several generations of storage media, and recertifying the electronics costs far more than buying another box of disks. Floppy-to-USB emulators now cover some of those machines, but fitting one is an upgrade project rather than a drop-in repair.
Why is San Francisco spending $212 million to retire a floppy disk system?
Because the disks are load-bearing. San Francisco's Muni Metro runs subway train control on a system installed in the Market Street tunnel in 1998, and the DOS software that drives its central servers is loaded from floppy disks.
In October 2024 the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board approved a $212 million contract with Hitachi Rail to replace it, ABC7 News reported, as part of a wider rebuild of the Muni Metro control system. The reason was not nostalgia. The agency said parts for a system of that age were no longer available from the supplier.
The replacement is a communications-based system that tracks trains using Wi-Fi and cellular signals rather than fixed track circuits. Installation was expected to run from late 2027 into early 2028, with Hitachi Rail contracted to support the system for 20 years after that.
That timeline is the useful detail for anyone asking whether floppy disks are still used in 2026. A major American transit system still boots from them every day, and the published plan does not retire them until 2028 at the earliest.
Why did Japan need until 2024 to quit?
Japan is the clearest case of a government written into the floppy disk era. Regulations did not merely permit the format, they required it: more than a thousand rules told businesses to submit data to the state on floppy disks and other physical media.
The Digital Agency worked through 1,034 of those regulations. The last one covered records kept by automotive recyclers, and it was scrapped on June 28, 2024.
Digital Minister Taro Kono marked the moment with the least bureaucratic sentence a minister has produced in years. "We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" he said in a statement reported by The Register in 2024. Kono had declared war on the format after taking the post in 2022.
The pattern holds wherever a rule, a certification or a machine made replacing the format expensive. Consumers dropped floppy disks within a few years of cheap CD burners and USB sticks arriving. Institutions needed another decade and a half, and a few, Muni among them, are not finished yet.
What actually killed the floppy disk?
File sizes did. A 3.5-inch disk held 1.44 MB, which was fine for a term paper and hopeless for a digital photo, an MP3 or a software installer.
The industry tried to build a bigger floppy first. The Iomega Zip drive was the most popular attempt, and it sold well enough to look like the successor before cheap recordable CDs undercut it.
Hardware makers then stopped waiting. Apple shipped the iMac G3 in 1998 with no floppy drive at all, a decision mocked at the time and copied by everyone within a few years. The longer version of that story is in our piece on how the iMac G3 killed the beige box.
USB flash drives finished the job. They were rewritable, they held hundreds of times more, they needed no driver on a modern machine, and they did not die from a magnet or a coffee spill. One warning for anyone holding a shoebox of disks: magnetic media degrades, and disks stored in a garage for 25 years often read badly or not at all, so copy the files off now rather than later, the same rule that applies to digitizing old VHS tapes. The format survives in one other place: the save icon in thousands of programs is still a 3.5-inch diskette, drawn for users who have never held one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do they still make floppy disks in 2026?
No. Sony, the last major manufacturer, announced in April 2010 that it would stop production of 3.5-inch floppy disks by March 2011, and no company picked the format back up. Every floppy disk on sale in 2026 was manufactured before 2011, whether it is sealed new old stock or a used disk that has been wiped and relabeled.
Where can you buy floppy disks now?
Specialist resellers and marketplace sellers are the entire floppy disk market in 2026. The best known is floppydisk.com in Lake Forest, California, which The Hustle reported in 2023 was selling 3.5-inch disks for about $1 each, and Etsy sellers list used lots and sealed 1990s boxes. No retail channel carries new floppy disks, because none have been manufactured since 2011.
What still uses floppy disks?
Industrial, aviation and transit equipment, mostly. Reuters reported in 2022 that floppydisk.com's main customers were embroidery shops, industrial users and aircraft maintenance crews, and San Francisco's Muni Metro still loads its 1998 train control software from floppy disks, with a $212 million replacement contract approved in October 2024 and installation planned for late 2027 into early 2028. Japan's government scrapped its last regulation requiring floppy disks on June 28, 2024.