8 Oct
2005
8 Oct
'05
7:35 a.m.
Scott Stevens wrote:
On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 20:40:25 +0100 (BST)
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
I'm not so sure - I seem to find that 3.5" floppies bought today only
handle a few read/write cycles before they die, whereas floppies from
back in the disks' heyday are *much* more reliable. There seems to have
been a drop in the quality of the physical media itself over time.
Funnily enough, storage quality seems to have got *worse* over time.
CDs, DVDs and modern hard drives all seem piss-poor when it comes to
reliability for the amount of data they're expected to handle. Back in
the day you could write your few KB of spreadsheet to a floppy and know
that it'd almost certainly be OK. These days you write your movie (or
whatever) to a CD and it's a totally lottery whether you can read it
back again a month or two later, or whether it'll work on a different drive.
Maybe there is some sense in all these USB storage devices (much as I
dislike USB). At least there are no moving parts or optical shenanigans
to go wrong, so if data written to such a device verifies it presumably
should be good for subsequent reads...
cheers
Jules
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.