You're right, mechanical floppy drives are pretty pointless nowadays. Well, I love them anyway, somehow I find these things appealing. Maybe because it is usually possible to fix them with reasonable effort, not like today's flash devices. For the hardcore fan the floppy sound is irreplaceable, too. And I have not seen any hardware floppy emulator so far that does this job nearly as good as WinUAE. The HxC emulator that I own has a buzzer and kind of imitates the stepper sound at least but its sound is far from being like an actual drive.
It is a little crazy but I like to have my Amigas as close as possible to the original. And that includes the pesky floppy drive.
In many ways all these later gadgets and gismos do not make for a real Amiga. I real Amiga is one fitted with a floppy drive, hard drive as an addition. An emulator is not a real Amiga and neither are these goteck thingy whatsits or flash drives. They corrupt the original base machines and in many ways destroy the beauty of the original designs. Being a purest I live with my Amigas as they were designed and only plug stuff in that was essentially part of the original game plan. I kinda am happy with some of the later expansions but sorry... camera memory and anything that cuts the case is just destructive. Worst I guess was the breaking up say a 1200 to put in what is essentially a PC tin box. Never made any sense to me.
And it is not hard at all running the original Amigas as intended. They are a joy to treasure and a day never goes by when I am not working on at least three or four machines. Like now as I decrunch dms demos on my 4000, test them on my 500 with GVP and play Settlers on my 1200 that sits behind me. And all the time I am swapping floppy disks and writing and testing stuff. It really just wouldn't be the same if the monitor didn't click between screen formats, or the drive wasn't gently clicking or there wasn't that noise of the final writing to the floppy disk. Pure magic. Its about the whole sensation and that includes the noises, sounds and experience.
