[cctalk] Re: Computer of Thesus (was: Re: Re: Computer Museum uses GreaseWeazle to help exonerate Maryland Man)

I have had nothing but trouble with floppy disks. I have an IBM3174 which has 2.4Mb 5.25" floppy drives. It takes ages (10-15mins perhaps) to load. If I load from a GOTEK its equally slow but it usually loads first time. From real floppy less often. 2.4Mb disks are like hens teeth. I still have the original disks and drives but if I use them I risk damaging irreplaceable delicate media. The experience is less noisy but only a little less. Without the GOTEK I feel it would be useless. My PC Server seems to have similar issues. I have several drives for it, and I need them for several little tasks, like re-building the RAID array which I seen to need to do often..... .... so its currently useless as I can get a GOTEK working. My Atari ST also has a GOTEK. Again it works with the GOTEK. Less good with the real floppy. Even though its only a 720k its unreliable.... Again I have the drives and disks still.... Lastly I have a Tandy Color Computer. I don't even have a floppy, so without the CoCo SDC that lets me load floppy images from an SD Card. Without that its back to cassettes or more likely AVI files loaded from a computer... So whilst I would love to continue to use floppies, in my experience it kills any chance of getting anything to work... .. and I think many of the issues are that the media is getting soft. Perhaps baking would help? Dave