10 Apr
2007
10 Apr
'07
9:52 p.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
The failure mode I've seen is oxide/binder coming
off, clogging the head
and
carving little concentric rings in the media :-(
If it's a case of the binder absorbing moisture and losing grip, it might be
an idea to try baking the discs for a bit to dry out the binder. The only
problem is, if you get the disc too hot (the words 'Curie temperature' spring
to mind) then the data's toast...
What would be ideal is a floppy drive with a flying (non-contacting) head,
sort of like a hard drive. I doubt it's possible to do that though...
Once the buildup starts, S/N ratio goes into the
toilet, so the inner
tracks
often have errors.
Hm, rig up something to unmount the heads, run some kind of cleaner over them,
then remount them automatically?
I'm probably thinking up overcomplex solutions again.. my design style is
somewhat Rube Goldberg...
One of the techniques I've thought about to
mitigate this is, as you
say, just
snapshot all of the data without analysis, to avoid sitting on a track
for a
minimal number of rotations, stagger-read tracks, or read them in inner
to outer
track order.
Why would reading from inside to outside (track 80 to track 0) help? If the
oxide's loose, won't it build up on the heads (and strip off of the disc)
whichever way you read the disc?
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