On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 20:40:25 +0100 (BST)
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
I've pointed out several tinms here that the first
disks I bought for
my TRS-80 Model 1 cost me \pounds 5.00 _each_ (not a box of 10 or
anything like that).. That mackine put 88K on each disk (single sided,
35 cylinders, FM (single desnity)). Point is, those disks are still
readable 20 years later.
I would like to be able to pay a reasonable amount -- say \pounds 5.00
to \pounds 10.00 for a 3.5" disk with the same quality level. Because
my data is worth a lot more than that.
Maybe what's needed is a lower density format and/or a redundant
filesystem using the current media. Surely a redundant filesystem or
lower density encoding scheme that only tried to fit 88K on a 3-1/2" HD
floppy diskette would succeed in having MUCH greater longetivity. Maybe
there's a 'market' for something like that, i.e. a disk format where
data is written redundantly on ten zones of the drive or something. It
really should be mostly a software problem.