Diskettes, which brand?

[NJRoadfan]

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.

 

[Rockin' Kat]

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...

 

[Mk.558]

Imaging programs like DiskCopy are very unforgiving too. A hint of a bad sector and they spit out the disk.

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.

 

[Aoresteen]

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.