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We store more data than at any time in the history of the planet, and store it more impermanently. At first, my thought on reading your post was, "What a clone! Why would anyone want to use a 5 1/4 inch floppy today?" Then I thought about the fact that there's probably nobody on my entire campus that can read from a 5 1/4 inch floppy anymore, and what happens if you need information from one? My experience has also been that most stored media over eight years old has started to degrade anyway.

I think most stuff that's needed is ported over to a new storage methodology before the old one completely goes away. Flash drives have just about eliminated the floppy disk altogether, and the large cheap arrays may make portable hard drives the replacement for the DVD.

Oh, no, it's certainly not because I think it is any better,
it's just because I "want" to keep it operational.

My basement is an elephant's graveyard of old electronics.
That is the category the 5 1/4" floppy drive is in.
In a few more years, the 3 1/2" drives will face the same fate.

I also have a fully functioning "record changer"; a fully functioning 8-track player; and a hand-cranked Victrola.

Once I had to explain to some of my kids teen aged friends what a "record" was and a what "needle" did. They said, "Oh, so it works like a CD player then?" I said. "Well, yeah, kinda like that."

My favorite is probably my fully-functioning old candlestick-style rotary-dial telephone ... the real thing, not one of the modern reproductions with the touch tone buttons on it. It takes two hands to use it. You have to hold the ear piece in one hand while you dial the number (yes, I said "dial", it still works) with the other hand, and then you have to lean over and talk into the mouthpiece.

Oh, well.
"See you on the flip side."

>My experience has also been that most stored media over eight years old has started to degrade anyway.<

Here's a link that might interest you:

http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/specsformats/CDDVDlongevity.php