29 Sep
2006
29 Sep
'06
12:20 p.m.
Subject: Re: FW: Third round of Diskette Experiments completed (results)
From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:54:51 +0000
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
Allison wrote:
Actually I was talkkking about 8 and 5,25 media I was trying to recover
data from.
Generally floppies do not like any abrasive
damage, holes, some solvents
and of course magnetic fields. Other than that it's amazing what
will survive.
.... unless it's a 3.5" floppy made in the last 6 or so years, then you just
need to *look* at them funny and they fail :) Actually, typically I find the failure rate to be about
2/3 - I don't think I
can think of a single other product that reaches the consumer with such a high
rating.
Jules,
The last time I'd seens that failure rate I started checking the drives.
It seeems the drives had so much dust (at work) they were scraping the
media to failure. Cleaned the drives and the problem would go away
for a few months. The media was a the cheapest 3.5 available. What
would happen is once the heads built up a mixute of media and dust
it would routinely destroy disks after one use after that. Outside
of that and outright bad drives I found 3.5" to be very reliable and
somewhat more immune to some of the things that kill soft jacket disks.
In fact when AOL was sending their virus out on 3.5" floppies (pre bloat)
I'd use them and still have a few that see regular use. I figure they are
as cheap as they come!
Allison