Thread
Diskettes, which brand?
Do you guys know wich brand is reliable and still freshly fabricated? I thought it is time to copy all my old 3,5 floppys to new material.
Any advice?
Any advice?
3M was generally considered to be the best, before Imation took over manufacturing after 1996. I doubt that 15+ year old NOS disks will still be reliable (and easy to find), given that the shelf life of disks is generally about 3 years tops.
In my region, Maxell is still spinning out new floppies, and they can still be found at Staples, and Office Depot. I'm not sure what the situation is in Europe, but I've never run into a problem with Maxell floppies. Their recent VHS tapes, however, are a different story.
In my region, Maxell is still spinning out new floppies, and they can still be found at Staples, and Office Depot. I'm not sure what the situation is in Europe, but I've never run into a problem with Maxell floppies. Their recent VHS tapes, however, are a different story.
I regularly buy these generic 50 packs of 800k floppies off ebay. Very rarely do I get a bad disk. Big fan of Verbatim too; never had a problem.
Sony floppies seem to take a good beating and keep going. The failure rate on double density disks is a lot lower than a lot of the other stuff out there right now.
Where did you get failure rates?
I'm after 1,44 MB floppys and have seen that TDK is still selling them. However, i neither know how old they are nor how reliable they are. For all i know they just buy at the cheapest chinese sweatshop. :lol:
I'm after 1,44 MB floppys and have seen that TDK is still selling them. However, i neither know how old they are nor how reliable they are. For all i know they just buy at the cheapest chinese sweatshop. :lol:
While further researching the problem of reliability and floppys, i stumbled over the fact that Verbatim is the last major manufacturer of 3,5 Inch MF2HD floppys. Verbatim sells about 50 million of them globally. Most are sold in east europe and russia.
Verbatim it is then. :approve:
Verbatim it is then. :approve:
I'm STILL sorting through that 4000+ disk conquest I had a few years ago. There waere a TON of sony floppies with random data on them and after I poke through them for useful extensions or anything I give them a frest format. these things were ABUSED but I'm averaging 2/10 being bad.
I see.
However, it seems Sony stopped making floppys in march 2011. They sold only in the local japanese market. They still had a volume of 12 millionen floppys. but if you had 3 billion floppys before you tend to see the business as insignificant i guess.
Anyways, you can not get new Sony floppys.
I understand that, because of larger structures, DD floppys have an expected lifetime of 15 to 20 years, HD floppys an expected lifetime of 5 years. I wonder what the expected lifetime of ED floppys is, 6 month? :lol:
That leaves me with the cheap chinese stuff or Verbatim.
BTW, i learned why the russians and east europe still uses that much floppys, they transfer their tax data with them. ;D
However, it seems Sony stopped making floppys in march 2011. They sold only in the local japanese market. They still had a volume of 12 millionen floppys. but if you had 3 billion floppys before you tend to see the business as insignificant i guess.
Anyways, you can not get new Sony floppys.
I understand that, because of larger structures, DD floppys have an expected lifetime of 15 to 20 years, HD floppys an expected lifetime of 5 years. I wonder what the expected lifetime of ED floppys is, 6 month? :lol:
That leaves me with the cheap chinese stuff or Verbatim.
BTW, i learned why the russians and east europe still uses that much floppys, they transfer their tax data with them. ;D
Well my personal opinion, reliable, not, cheap chinese or not, Who cares at this point? Because nowadays better storage mediums for long-term are available. For me personally, using floppies are only for boot disks, or quick sneakernet of files. Anything long-term or reliable, it doesnt matter. So a throw-away disk is perfectly acceptable.
Whenever I find NOS 3M diskettes, I always snap them up. Managed to get three boxes last year and of the ten disks in the box I opened, all worked.
In order of reliability from personal experience:
3M
IBM
BASF
Sony
Verbatim
Maxell
Memorex
Nashua
Fujifilm
Generic
Office Depot
(note these are for 3.5" floppies; the order doesn't change much for 5.25" but place Elephant Memory Systems between IBM and BASF)
In order of reliability from personal experience:
3M
IBM
BASF
Sony
Verbatim
Maxell
Memorex
Nashua
Fujifilm
Generic
Office Depot
(note these are for 3.5" floppies; the order doesn't change much for 5.25" but place Elephant Memory Systems between IBM and BASF)
What brand were the apple branded floppies made by?
Sony, I think.
I had some old Sony floppies lying around (they were actually Dad's old disks-he said I could use them! :approve: ). One developed a bad sector after a few weeks' light use.
pretty much if it fails a verify, i toss it,
but sometimes i will erase the disk 2 times and the second time it will verify fine…
but sometimes i will erase the disk 2 times and the second time it will verify fine…
I found an old radio shack demag unit. Ncycling just a demag handheld 115 volt unit. Think it would be good to demag the heads of the floppy drives?
The only ones I can get readily here in Ireland are Verbatim, and they are brutal as we say, i.e. from my experience they are of poor quality. I have bought a few boxes in the last while and each contained, on average, two faulty / dodgy ones. Could also be the way they were stored in the shop but I'm not impressed!
Good thing is that they have a lifetime warranty so I just wait until I have 10 faulty ones and bring them back to the shop for a repalcement box (or after 6 months mail them with the receipt to Verbatim).
Good thing is that they have a lifetime warranty so I just wait until I have 10 faulty ones and bring them back to the shop for a repalcement box (or after 6 months mail them with the receipt to Verbatim).
A real expert advised me there is no point in degaussing FDD heads, because they make binary signals rather than the analog signals of audio tape heads. That surprised me because the recording mode is FM, but it must be pulsed FM rather than FM over an AM carrier (which is radio FM).
Rick
Quite correct. :approve:
I've been told that Athana is the only company still making floppies and that any new ones you see on store shelves now are just rebranded.
I dont know how true that is though. I bought some 5.25 DS/DD Floppies from them a few months ago over the phone. I can't yet speak for how reliable they are.
http://www.athana.com/
I dont know how true that is though. I bought some 5.25 DS/DD Floppies from them a few months ago over the phone. I can't yet speak for how reliable they are.
http://www.athana.com/
All modern 3.5" HD floppies are pretty much crap. Brand new out of the box, they will format fine and a few weeks later develop bad sectors. Its not the floppy drives either. What I can't figure out is why my disks from the mid 90s are all fine, but anything from around 1998 or so is completely toast. Its frustrating when I have to boot a machine that only uses floppies only to have to go through a pile of 10-15 disks to find 1 good one. Imaging programs like DiskCopy are very unforgiving too. A hint of a bad sector and they spit out the disk.
It probably doesn't help that with reduced sales things sit around longer on sales floors while more product sits on warehouse shelves waiting for replenishment orders... Waiting in warehouses with poor temp/humidity controls etc...
I ran into this problem when making 7.0 and 7.1NAD disks which pretty much have less than 10K free space, as a general rule.
Then I had a lightbulb moment: If I make a ShrinkWrap virtual disk, and it has like 4K free, and if the FDD has over a certain number of bad sectors, effectively reducing it capacity from 1440K to something like 1220K, then it won't "fit".
The dependency on floppy disks and SCSI hard drives is the major reason I like to avoid the 68K series, although System 6 support rocks. Although...the Platinum Deluxe storage method pretty much can make System 7.5, 7.6, or even higher Emergency Network Access RAM disk stuff. Using a CD-ROM or another Platinum Deluxe str("Storage Type") means that any HDD failures should be pretty much extinct.
I haven't bought a floppy in over 15 years. I have a box of 'junk" floppies that I re-use when I need a floppy. The box dates back to the mid 90's with disks from the 80's (AOL provided me with a crapload of floppies). I give them a full slow format. I toss about 1 in 20 I'd say. Last year my office got rid of all the 3.5" floppies in the office. I was the last person with a floppy drive so I took all the floppies home. There were 4 new boxes; the rest were used. Total of about 100 disks.
All my stuff is now back up on multiple SCSI hard drives. I'm going to start burning CDs soon. I just went through a bunch of 5.25" floppies from the 80's and they ALL read fine! And they had been stored in a hot Georgia storage unit for at least 7 years. Ditto for the 3.5" disks. They read just fine (MS-DOS. Will check the Mac disks tomorrow).
Just scrounge up what you can, give them a fresh format, and use them. I'd start archining them to CDs & multiple hard drives.
All my stuff is now back up on multiple SCSI hard drives. I'm going to start burning CDs soon. I just went through a bunch of 5.25" floppies from the 80's and they ALL read fine! And they had been stored in a hot Georgia storage unit for at least 7 years. Ditto for the 3.5" disks. They read just fine (MS-DOS. Will check the Mac disks tomorrow).
Just scrounge up what you can, give them a fresh format, and use them. I'd start archining them to CDs & multiple hard drives.