4 May
2005
4 May
'05
8:43 a.m.
On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 08:31 -0500, JP Hindin wrote:
On Wed, 4 May 2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
Sorry, should have been clearer - I mean for the same type of media.
i.e. 3.5 HD floppies from ten years ago seem to be consistently *way*
better than brand-new branded 3.5" media. I can't believe there was a
change in the equipment because typically the same manufacturers who
used to make floppies still do, so presumably it's a quality issue.
I've just been going through some floppies bought within the last two
years (mainly Sony, but not likely to be from the same batch) - I've
pulled apart the failures and they all seem to have discolouration or
streaks / smears on the surfaces.
In other words, it's not a density issue (i.e. higher density media is
more prone to failure - although of course that holds true too) - more
of a quality / fabrication issue. What I don't understand is how the
"decent" manufaturers did a good job for so many years and then started
churning out junk; it's not like 50 years passed and the knowledge of
how to make a floppy disk got lost or anything!)
cheers
Jules
On Wed, 4 May 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:
I've always put this down to the vast increase of track density on the
media. Of course, I could be full of fluff, but it would certainly explain
why I can read my 30 year old 8" floppies (Which I could almost use a
microscope to pick out the 0s and 1s) and why 1.44MB (or
greater?) 3.5" disks are such a disappointment. Anyone know why modern floppy disks are such
total junk? They seem to
often develop problems after only one or two writes - whereas back in
the day they were always pretty reliable.
That's a really good question. I'd like an answer myself. I routinely
read disks that are 20-25-30 years old with few problems, yet I can't walk
10 feet to another computer and recover a file I just copied onto a modern
3.5" disk without the disk going bad. Go figure.