Modern floppy disk question...

Yes, they're too damn cheap.... I can rememebr paying \pounds 3.00 for a 5.25" floppy disk. One disk, not a box of 10. My old model 1 stored 88K on such a disk. And those disks are still readable 20+ years later. I now get 10 1.44M disks for not much more, and I'm lucky if they're readable a week later. Hmm.. Some progress :-( Floppy drives are the same. My first drive cost over \pounds 200. It was properly aligned and still works (as do plenty of older 8" drives here, of course). Modern drives seem to cost about \pounds 20, and a very poorly made. I've stuck an aligment disk in some of them to find the alignment is marginal (and that's being kind) on brand new drives. You guessed it. I'd like to be able to pay \pounds 200 or more for a modern drive, provided it came properly aligned and I could get real manuals for it (I have service manuals -- real service manuals -- for some of the older drives). A few years back I was given 2 carrier bags full of bulk-erased RX50 disks -- they'd come from DEC software distribution kits, etc. I've yet to have one of those fail to format and work reliably -- even as double sided 80 cylinder (the RX50 was, of course, a single-sided drive). -tony