Forget 3.5" floppies—San Francisco's Muni Metro is one of the few transit systems still using 5.25" ones. But not for much longer: the vintage storage media will be replaced as part of a $212m overhaul of railroad computer systems there.
In April, SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin said the increasing risk of the disks suffering data degradation meant that at some point there will be "a catastrophic failure." … SFMTA's board has approved a deal with Hitachi Rail, the external division of Japanese tech giant Hitachi, that will bring the system into the modern era.
Aging floppies are only a small problem. Replacing a fragile "loop cable system used for sending data" with less bandwidth than a dial-up modem is "more pressing than replacing the floppies," which are not in immediate danger of catastrophic failure.
