22 Feb
2008
22 Feb
'08
12:01 p.m.
On 22 Feb 2008 at 9:14, Ray Arachelian wrote:
I'm wondering if temperature had anything to do
with it. They sat
outside my house (in the box) for a few hours and were obviously cold
when I read them. I disregarded the usual good idea of acclimation and
immediately attempted to image them, mostly because I keep an air
conditioner on at all times in my computer room (which of course in this
weather acts as a fan). So if anything, the difference between the
machine and the disks was less than 20F.
Temperature and its buddy, humidity have a lot to do with the
readability of diskettes. Too much humidity (as in a cold diskette
in a warm room generating condensation) will cause the cookie to drag
in its jacket, for example.
I try to allow diskettes to take some time to acclimate (for 2 or 3
days) in a low humidity (20 percent RH) environment at 20C. I don't
know if an extremely dry environment would be any better.
Then, there's some media that's just plain garbage--it was terrible
when it was new and is no better now (e.g. Wabash, Control Data,
Elephant, etc.).
Cheers,
Chuck