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Actually late floppies from the early 00s are terrible, but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible. I have a huge pile of floppies fr
by wazoox 4y ago
Actually late floppies from the early 00s are terrible, but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible. I have a huge pile of floppies from 1988 to 1992 and they all work. Even HDD ones formatted as FDD, though it's not recommended, still work fine 30 years later.
I have a 1987 Apple //c with a bunch of 5.25" floppies of the same period and they all work just fine : games, UCSD Pascal, utilities, Mouse Desk...
- Tor3 4y agoThat's my experience as well. The ones that fail are 3.5" HD floppies (1.44MB). Over on the ctech mailing list an old-timer expert explained that it's basically because the 3.5" HD floppies are just above the density limit the medium and technology can handle, which is why the 720KB DD floppies are fine (and 1.2MB 5.25" ones are also fine), but the HD ones fail. I tried to recover all my floppies from the eighties and nineties, it went very well except for the 3.5" HD ones - couldn't recover a single one, whatever drives I used. From what I'm told the 8" ones should read fine too, we'll see.. I have many, and I have a drive, but I haven't got it set up yet.
- bombolo 4y ago> but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible Not in my experience. Mine all failed.
- wazoox 4y agoMaybe you had a bad drive or something? I didn't even stored them in very good conditions...