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Floppydisk.com – Recycle 3.5“ Floppy Disks
- rbanffy 4y agoNoooooo! Give them to your friendly retrogeek nearby. They'll be extremely happy and grateful, especially if it's one of the weird formats (3", 8", MD, Zip, Syquest, tape...)
- forinti 4y agoI second that. A colleague recently retired and gave me a box of 3.5"s.
- Teknoman117 4y agoI've got a handful of LS120 disks and their storage cases I got from my parents that are certain to have personal data on them but I haven't ever seen an LS120 drive in person...
- Overtonwindow 4y agoDo people still use Zip disks? I've got a dozen of those.
- waynesonfire 4y agolooks like floppydisk.com doesn't even recycle those, "SORRY WE NO LONGER RECYCLE 5.25 DISKS OR ZIP DISKS."
- readingnews 4y agoI literally got a new mobo and decided to put some of my old drives in the box for fun. One of them was a 250MB zip drive. Unfortunately, I only have one zip disk, but it might be fun if it works (I did not get to it yet, still trying to get my SCSI tape drive up).
- bombcar 4y agoI'm sure someone somewhere is using them, wipe the ones you have and they'll probably sell on eBay.
- dspillett 4y agoIf anyone in the UK wants a few, I think I might have a box at the back of a cupboard. Mostly with things like DOS 6.x and Windows 3.x on. No idea what condition they'll be in after all this time since I last used a floppy drive, but they've always been stored in cool dry places for the most part.
- pelagicAustral 4y agoI wouldn't mind buying those from you. I've got a delivery address in the UK... Deal?
- dspillett 4y agoI can't see the larger stash I thought I had of official Windows and DOS disks, they might have been passed on or chucked at some point (or are hiding somewhere in a deep pile of boxes!). I did find a stack of 35 hand-labelled which according to the labels contain things like Doom, AfterDark, and such. Happy to post them if you want to pay P&P, or drop them off for nothing if you are in York. Drop me a message (email address in profile) if interested.
- pelagicAustral 4y agoI'm currently looking for 3.5's for a coding competition that only allows code to fit inside a floppy. Unfortunately they don't send to my radically extreme location.
- netule 4y agoI get mine off eBay with varying success rates. It really is hit or miss. I suggest sticking with the ones that have a metal slide on them rather than the later, cheaper, plastic slides which tend to disintegrate over time.
- dogma1138 4y agoVerbatim and TDK and probably a few other still manufacture 3.5 inchers you can buy new stock on Amazon and other retailers globally. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-87410-MF2HD-Inch-MBDiskettes/dp/B0000511BI/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-87410-MF2HD-Inch-MBDiskett...
- actionfromafar 4y agoWhat?! This goes against everything I believed.
- Symbiote 4y agoNeither Verbatim nor TDK's website have any current mention of floppy discs. I would assume the listings on Amazon are old stock manufactured 10+ years ago. IBM say Sony were last to manufacture them, and production ended in March 2011: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/floppy/transform/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/floppy/tr... Although this article says Sony only had a 70% market share when they stopped production: https://www.cnet.com/deals/sandisks-extreme-pro-2tb-ssd-is-back-down-to-its-best-ever-price-today/ https://www.cnet.com/deals/sandisks-extreme-pro-2tb-ssd-is-b...
- jmclnx 4y agoInteresting, I will need to contact them :)
- bcjordan 4y agoIt'd be neat if they had an optional "donate to archive" option which would let textfiles.com attempt to recover any non-personal software/resources from the past (as he wrote in 2011 it's nearly too late to recover anything from the heyday of floppies, but to send to him if possible - http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191)
- TonyTrapp 4y agoTo be precise, he's talking about 5.25" floppies, not 3.5" floppies. The latter are more durable. But either way it's a good idea to get your data off them!
- livrem 4y agoI may have been lucky, but I still have had good results reading old 360 kB floppies. It was maybe 5 years ago since I tried, and maybe 10 since I made a major attempt to copy all/most of them, so perhaps they have degraded more recently. Bought a Kryoflux a few years ago and hopefully I will get around to use it on the more interesting floppies before it is too late. But the newer 1.2 MB 5.25" floppies are a pain. Apparently they can be very difficult to read on a drive that is not similar enough to the one they were written on and with correct calibration. I have a bunch I could not read at all, and a few that I only managed to get the file lists from. Only a few could be fully read. A bit sad as several of those from ~1990 contain source code I wrote and have not found any other copies of.
- mrlonglong 4y agoHow hard is it to start manufacturing of brand new floppy disks?
- projektfu 4y agoHe says it's not trivial. You have the injection molded shell, the sheet metal cover, the spring, the stamped hub, the little pads, glue, the write-protect switch, the plastic disc and the oxide layer that has to be formulated and applied correctly, for a niche product for machines that themselves are becoming obsolete. The earlier floppies were probably easier to make, because they just had folded commodity plastic shells, pads, glue and the disc with its oxide. No special hub or fancy case.
- bombcar 4y agoIt would be painfully easy if it was something that had a market. The problem is the market for it is so small that it's not worth even keeping the existing equipment running.
- sys32768 4y agoIn 2014, I sold about 3k PC shareware 3.5" floppy disks to this guy. He had a working floppy duplicating and labeling machine that was mesmerizing to watch. I transferred the contents of several hundred of these before succumbing to fatigue: https://archive.org/details/frostbyte_1980s_DOS_collection https://archive.org/details/frostbyte_1980s_DOS_collection I also had acquired about 7k 5.25" floppies from the same shareware guy I got the 3.5" disks from, but sadly those were all bad. It appeared he had stored them outside. I'll never forget my little Toyota truck so laden with thousands of floppies disks that it was almost fishtailing down the 5 freeway, nor will I forgot seeing in my rear view mirror several 5.25" take flight and wave goodbye.
- binarymax 4y agoHow long does it take to transfer 1 disk? I definitely understand the tedium you must have felt...but was it just all in one burst or a couple days or did you give up after a month or two?
- sys32768 4y agoI do regret not transferring them all, but it was a chaotic time during which we moved to another state. In the shuffle, I lost track of what I transferred and didn't have the will to start over. I've yet to have any nightmares about software I may have made go extinct, but I may now...
- miffe 4y agoIt takes about 1:40. I just measured ;) https://youtu.be/Q3dK-Fgw1Yo https://youtu.be/Q3dK-Fgw1Yo
- mtmail 4y agoArticle about floppydisk.com with photos and interview with the business owner https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...
- Gelob 4y agoGreat article, thanks
- runlaszlorun 4y agoI have memory of seeing what I swore was an 11” floppy. I just did a quick internet search and the interwebs are saying that 8” were the biggest? Anyone else know of an 11”? I started as a kid in the early PC days. So 5 1/4” was common, 3.5” was new, and you’d see the occasional 8” on a TRS-80 or what not and you’d chuckle but not think much of it. But I remember finding this 11” somewhere and thinking ‘oh my god, that’s a lot if surface area for 170kb.’ I tried to keep it along with some 8” but it apparently is no where to be found after 7-8 moves since.
- petee 4y agoI've never heard of it, but coincidentally (maybe?) 8" on the diagonal is ~11" Edit: Or its a Videodisc, they were 10-12", and in a cassette -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodisc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodisc
- bombcar 4y agoThere were floppy-like things very very old for ancient mainframes that may have been entirely custom; but those more often had reel-to-reel tapes. There were removable hard drive platters but those weren't "floppy"
- dotBen 4y agoI was at a tech event and I realized the 20-something I was chatting with didn't know what a floppy disk was. I had to explain it to him and he only got it when I finally showed him images on Google and he sort of got the concept. He was a software engineer and he had literally never heard of floppy disks! I'm 41 and I felt so old...
- bombcar 4y agoI used to explain what they are by starting with "imagine a hard drive where the platters were removable" and now people ask "what's a hard drive?"
- Teknoman117 4y agoIt's like that post on the PC gaming subreddit where someone was unironically asking about what interface was on a pictured hard drive ... it was IDE.
- actionfromafar 4y agoMost people now never saw the innards of their computers (or phones) and also, everything is always "on", so there's less distinction between RAM and disk.
- Teknoman117 4y agoThere's definitely a threshold point for knowing about them. I just turned 30, and in practice, I never used them. (But I just missed them) About the time I got to the point in school of needing to send documents (mid-00s), flash drives had come down in price that everyone had them, and by 11th grade, even we had school emails. The majority of my use of them was that I cut my computing/networking/programming teeth on all the 90's and early 00's computer hardware that my dad had hanging around. I had piles of floppies and no flash drive so I made do with what I had available.
- randomluck040 4y agoThis brings back memories. I‘m 32 now and back in the day, we were trading GameBoy roms on floppies because there was nothing else we could use. Essentially we were using them like USB sticks.
- formvoltron 4y agoWait, does this mean my 5.25" disks are trash!?
- systems_glitch 4y agoYeah but we got the hookup on 5.25" DSDD: http://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/images/truckload.jpg http://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/images/truckload.jpg