29 Apr
2010
29 Apr
'10
12:03 p.m.
On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:49:38 -0600
"Jim MacKenzie" <jim at photojim.ca> wrote:
Strange... I've never had such problems with floppies on any of my
machines... Of course I (a) use a good name=-brand floppy disk and (b)
ensure that my drives are correctly aligned.
I still use floppies, even on modern systems.
I don't. And I am glad that floppies are gone.
3.5" flppies:
I stoped using floppies about 10 years ago. I was tired of copying the
same data to at least three floppies in the hope that at least one of
the floppies would be readable. At that time it was just impossible to get reliable media and drives. Floppies where cheap
and unreliable
Well, if you will buy cheap-n-nasty drives and disks...
PeeCee junk. It was a bit better in the early
90'is. (When a simple
floppy drive cost two or three times as much as a DVD drive today.)
I think I bought my last floppy drive about 15 years ago. It was a
name-brand (Teac) and I bought the service manual too. Never had any
problems with it...
The only real 'stock fault' I've had will floppies has been on the Sony
3.5" full-height drives. As is well knwom, if the eject linkage sticks,
the upper head will get ripped off when the disk ejects. Evey such drive
that comes through here gets stripped down and cleaned up. Only once did
I have to replace the head assembly )I took one from another drive with
electronic faults) and amazingily, while I obviously put the alignment
disk in, it was spot-on for radial alignment. I didn't have to adjust
anything.
8" flppies where already gone and replaced by
5.25", when I got my
fingers on a computer for the first time.
My first floppy drive was a 5.25" one ()on a TRS-80 Model 1). This has
not stopped me from obtaing 8" drives since then :-)
-tony