The German Navy's Brandenburg-class frigates still use floppy disks from the 70s

Currently, the German Navy (Marine) wants to replace the use of ancient 8-inch floppy disks on Project F123 Brandenburg-class frigates with some other, more modern removable storage media and is looking for opportunities for this. The ships were developed in the 1980s by German shipbuilding companies: Blohm + Voss and ThyssenKrupp; in 1992-1996, 4 units (F215 – F218) were built, which are still in the fleet.

It should be noted that on the said ships, the mentioned floppy disks are used as part of the statistical data collection system, which is critical for controlling basic functions such as propulsion and power generation. A floppy disk is a flexible magnetic disk (FMD) used for repeated recording and storage of data. It is a flexible plastic disk coated with a ferromagnetic layer and placed in a protective plastic casing. Reading or writing data is carried out using a special device - a disk drive.




Note that floppy disks became widespread from the 1970s to the early 2000s, replacing magnetic tapes and punched cards. At the end of the XNUMXth century, floppy disks began to give way to more capacious and advanced optical disks CD-R and CD-RW, and in the XNUMXst century to even more convenient flash drives.

Now the Germans are looking for a replacement for technologically outdated, but relatively reliable 30-year-old equipment. Perhaps they decided to follow in the footsteps of the Japanese and achieve a final victory over the floppy disks. However, it is unlikely to be able to do this quickly and at minimal cost, since modernizing a ship is a costly process. Replacing one node affects the others. IT experts say a floppy disk emulator could be a viable option.