24 Jan
2013
24 Jan
'13
8:56 p.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jan
2013, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
How DEC managed to obtain media which were
degraded on the
second side so frequently when none of the other 8" floppy media
I encountered had that problem (i.e. the other media were able to
either LLF both sides or none and VERY few failed the DS LLF)
I can't explain, but that was my experience.
Perhaps that was the origin of the silly rumor
(although not necessarily false) that MOST media
being manufactured had enormous failure rate
(higher than 50%?) and that therefore ALL media
was tested - those that passed on both sides were
sold as DS, those that only failed one side were
flipped over to present the "good" side and then sold
as SS.
Some versions of the stories go so far as to say
that finished diskettes were OPENED to flip the media.
(based on an assumption that media could not be tested
until it was installed in a jacket with sleeve and label)
Even if testing could not have been done without the jacket (which
seems sort of obviously to be false), .....
Q: If you had that high a failure rate, what would YOU
do about it?
Cherry pick out of what should have been trash, marginal media that
would test, or test PART, as "good" to market?
Q: What impact would the labor cost to do such have on total
production cost?
... it seems doubtful that the labour cost associated with testing each
individual floppy media would even be cost effective.
Or would you shut it down until you could get adequate
quality
that no significant portion tested "bad"?
Was Verbatim Datalife the result of such a shutdown?
Were Verbatim Datalife floppy media guaranteed for LIFE (of the
company - obviously)?
NOTE: in the civilized world (as opposed to our
industry),
manufacturing does SAMPLING of output, and statistically
determines whether to take the risk of any bad product,
based on the percentage of failures.
If one were to actually search through product searching
for ANY that could be marketed, then it could be assumed
that one would be inundated by product failures.
which happened.
As I specified before, my experience with floppy media was more
than satisfactory as far as the reliability of the media and retention
of the data was concerned. However, when more than 1 MB of
storage was needed, 8" floppy media were just too slow, bulky
and inconvenient to be worthwhile when tapes and then optical
media became available.
Jerome Fine