Floppy disks?
- Thread starter Cyber-Mav
- Start date
Caporegime
A good quality disk will likely be fine when read with a well maintained and decent drive.
The biggest issue comes from late-era floppies, when they had reached market saturation point and were made as cheaply as possible they tended to have awfully poor longevity. I’ve got many late 90s/early 2000s disks that are essentially scrap, however on the flip side I’ve got late 80s and early 90s disks (from when they actually cost a fair few quid per disk) that are perfect.
Obviously you’ll get exceptions to this, but if you are finding that older, higher quality disks are ALWAYS failing to read, it’s more likely to be your drive.
The biggest issue comes from late-era floppies, when they had reached market saturation point and were made as cheaply as possible they tended to have awfully poor longevity. I’ve got many late 90s/early 2000s disks that are essentially scrap, however on the flip side I’ve got late 80s and early 90s disks (from when they actually cost a fair few quid per disk) that are perfect.
Obviously you’ll get exceptions to this, but if you are finding that older, higher quality disks are ALWAYS failing to read, it’s more likely to be your drive.
Caporegime
I've got 3M, Dysan and Verbatim disks off the top of my head that are still perfect.
Imation, and BASF are also usually OK but I've had more failures of these.
The rest of the brands (or worse, unbranded) stuff that I've got is hit and miss.
Imation, and BASF are also usually OK but I've had more failures of these.
The rest of the brands (or worse, unbranded) stuff that I've got is hit and miss.
Also as the data density got higher the disks were more prone to failure. There are lots of floppy disks from the C64 era that are still readable, but they're only 144kb!
I remember using Verbatim floppies for archiving at work, as they were considered to be the most reliable.
I remember using Verbatim floppies for archiving at work, as they were considered to be the most reliable.