4 ms·

Floppies are more reliable. I have plenty of C64 and Apple II floppies that work fine. 5,25" floppies (especially lower density variants like the ones you ment

by einr 7y ago

Floppies are more reliable. I have plenty of C64 and Apple II floppies that work fine. 5,25" floppies (especially lower density variants like the ones you mention) are quite reliable indeed, but the most recently common 1.44 MB 3,5" floppy is terrible.

magduf 7y ago
Nope, when I was using 1.44MB floppies, they were extremely reliable. However, after most people had moved on, when I did use more recently-manufactured ones, they were indeed terrible. My theory is that, when Zip disks and CD-Rs took over and people stopped using 1.44MB floppies, the manufacturing of them changed, and both the disks and the drives became much crappier than they used to be. The drive manufacturing moved from Japan to Thailand, for instance, for some of the drives I looked at, and the components were noticeably crappier (drive motors much smaller, for instance). These were the days when every PC had a 1.44MB drive just for Windows XP drivers, and no one ever used the drive for anything else because it was just too small, so the OEMs really cut back on the quality since the drives weren't expected to be used much. But back in the early 90s, it wasn't like that; those disks were totally bulletproof, just like all the other floppies.
- madengr 7y ago
  I'm having the same issue with CD drives. The quality now is garbage, compared to the days of caddy loading. Recently bought 4 at $18 each, and will just through them out when they break. Even the Windows support of CDs has gone to shit. Windows 10 usually can't figure out if the burned CD was already ejected and inserted with a fresh one, and randomly retains files from the previous burn. Ripping audio CDs is slower than it used to be as the drives seem to become unbalanced.
- einr 7y ago
  Here's me replying to a 12 day old comment, but... You are right that at some point they started making (much) worse quality 1.44MB floppies (and drives, probably, though I have had nothing but good experiences with mid-2000's floppy drives so far), but I still say they're much less reliable overall than most 5,25" formats. I say this partly because I have a retro-computing hobby and when acquiring random floppies from various places my experience is that 360K floppies from the mid-80's almost invariably still work fine while DD and HD 3,5" floppies from the late 80's to mid 90's are about 50-75% unreadable garbage at this point. They just don't survive. I also remember having to throw out a lot of 3,5" floppies (name-brand, too; Sony, Verbatim, etc...) due to them becoming unreadable in just a few years in the late 90's. I mean, it's not surprising. Each bit is simply much physically larger on a 5,25" floppy.

by einr 7y ago

magduf 7y ago

Nope, when I was using 1.44MB floppies, they were extremely reliable. However, after most people had moved on, when I did use more recently-manufactured ones, they were indeed terrible. My theory is that, when Zip disks and CD-Rs took over and people stopped using 1.44MB floppies, the manufacturing of them changed, and both the disks and the drives became much crappier than they used to be. The drive manufacturing moved from Japan to Thailand, for instance, for some of the drives I looked at, and the components were noticeably crappier (drive motors much smaller, for instance). These were the days when every PC had a 1.44MB drive just for Windows XP drivers, and no one ever used the drive for anything else because it was just too small, so the OEMs really cut back on the quality since the drives weren't expected to be used much. But back in the early 90s, it wasn't like that; those disks were totally bulletproof, just like all the other floppies.

madengr 7y ago
I'm having the same issue with CD drives. The quality now is garbage, compared to the days of caddy loading. Recently bought 4 at $18 each, and will just through them out when they break. Even the Windows support of CDs has gone to shit. Windows 10 usually can't figure out if the burned CD was already ejected and inserted with a fresh one, and randomly retains files from the previous burn. Ripping audio CDs is slower than it used to be as the drives seem to become unbalanced.
einr 7y ago
Here's me replying to a 12 day old comment, but... You are right that at some point they started making (much) worse quality 1.44MB floppies (and drives, probably, though I have had nothing but good experiences with mid-2000's floppy drives so far), but I still say they're much less reliable overall than most 5,25" formats. I say this partly because I have a retro-computing hobby and when acquiring random floppies from various places my experience is that 360K floppies from the mid-80's almost invariably still work fine while DD and HD 3,5" floppies from the late 80's to mid 90's are about 50-75% unreadable garbage at this point. They just don't survive. I also remember having to throw out a lot of 3,5" floppies (name-brand, too; Sony, Verbatim, etc...) due to them becoming unreadable in just a few years in the late 90's. I mean, it's not surprising. Each bit is simply much physically larger on a 5,25" floppy.