Diskettes, which brand?

[tecneeq]

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?

 

[Concorde1993]

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.

 

[krye]

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.

 

[CelGen]

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.

 

[tecneeq]

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:

 

[tecneeq]

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:

 

[CelGen]

Where did you get failure rates?

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.

 

[tecneeq]

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

 

[techknight]

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.

 

[Scott Baret]

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)

 

[Macdrone]

What brand were the apple branded floppies made by?

 

[olePigeon]

Sony, I think.

 

[onlyonemac]

In order of reliability from personal experience:

3M

IBM

BASF

Sony

Verbatim

Maxell

Memorex

Nashua

Fujifilm

Generic

Office Depot

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.

 

[uniserver]

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…

 

[Macdrone]

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?

 

[genie_mac]

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).

 

[RickNel]

Think it would be good to demag the heads of the floppy drives?

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

 

[onlyonemac]

it must be pulsed FM rather than FM over an AM carrier (which is radio FM).

Quite correct. :approve:

 

[Rockin' Kat]

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/