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, proba

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.