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> and a signed floppy disk containing eight images that Andy Warhol created that day. He said he’s had them on display in his home for about 39 years. Shout ou
by cellularmitosis 2y ago
> and a signed floppy disk containing eight images that Andy Warhol created that day. He said he’s had them on display in his home for about 39 years.
Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium. I was quite disappointed when I discovered many of my writable CD's started failing at the 15 to 20 year mark.
- aidenn0 2y ago15-20 is about the lifetime of a floppy as well (and less than that for some of the cheaper mass-produced floppies like what AOL shipped for free).
- wkat4242 2y agoI've had really great experiences with recovering 3,5" floppies from 40 years ago. Not so much with 5 1/4". Despite the ultra low density of 360kB on that huge surface.
- dasil003 2y agoI wonder if it's due to contact with the soft shell
- account42 2y agoI guess it also depends on the drives and 3,5" drives have seen continued improvement for much longer.
- wkat4242 2y agoTrue. For the 3,5" drives I simply used a USB version which are available aplenty. For the 5 1/4" I needed to use a Greaseweazle ( https://sordan.ie/product/1527/newest-greaseweazle-v41-usb-floppy-adapter-flux-reader-writer/ https://sordan.ie/product/1527/newest-greaseweazle-v41-usb-f... ) as there are no USB versions available. The drive I have is a good quality HD drive though (1,2MB) so it should be able to read 360kB disks with no issue.
- _the_inflator 2y agoMine work now for almost 40 years. And don't forget: floppy disks have mechanical attrition. The floppy disk lifetime was, as always, an estimate. My 5 1/4 disks for C64 seem to be the way more robust product compared with the 3 1/2 for Amiga and later PC. Maybe information density plays a role here. CDs have the reflection layer problem, not the information loss per se. That's the main difference between disks and CDs.
- snvzz 2y agofor 3.5", DD have proven much more durable than HD. And notably HD were terrible at being used as DD, as is generally the case with Amiga floppies.
- _the_inflator 2y agoYep, I refrained from using them. Also too expensive. With the advent of Amiga hard disk I didn’t need that much disks anymore. I bought mine - 50mb! - at the World of Commodore 1991 I think.
- aidenn0 2y agoThat makes sense; my copy of Star Trek: The Rebel Universe (DD) still works, while few of my circa 1990 Sierra floppies (HD) work.
- jandrese 2y agoI stumbled across a DVD-RW last weekend and popped it in a drive to see if the files were still readable. I had read that for a -RW drive you shouldn't expect more than a few years, maybe a decade before it decays so I was not hopeful. However, the disc was fully readable and the checksums all came back clean even though it was burned in 2003.
- jagged-chisel 2y agoAnd you immediately made a copy, right? Right?
- alt227 2y agoTwo rights dont make a wrong
- jandrese 2y agoIt wasn't any kind of important data. It was a copy of some stuff I had made to bring to a meeting 20 years ago that's still readily available. If the data was important I wouldn't have left it on degrading optical media that I didn't trust. Also, the whole point of DVD-RWs was to replace stuff like floppies or Zip disks when you are sneakernetting things around. The same way you use uSD or thumb drives these days. They were never meant for long term archiving, if you were doing that you would use DVD-R or DVD+Rs instead.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium. Last I checked (Covid) about 2/3rd of my 5"1/4 Commodore 64 floppy disks were still working (they had to be about 35 y/o when I tried in 2020). But the ones working won't last much longer.
- account42 2y agoYeah, GP got lucky. At least CDs you can store in an airtight enclosure with moisture removed to help them last longer. For floppies it's enough to come close to a strong magnetic field to mess them up.
- snvzz 2y agoHopefully you didn't just check, but also copied any data you care about to modern storage?
- ahazred8ta 2y agoCommercially available write-once M-DISCs are rated for almost 1000 years.
- gambiting 2y agoAllegedly the quad layer BDXLs should have the same longevity as they are made using the exact same technology. Shame Sony just announced they are going to shut down the only remaining factory in the world making those, I've ordered some from Japan but I imagine they will shoot up in price once the official stocks deplete.
- zitterbewegung 2y agoSize of the Mdisc is 100GB be 128gb for Sony so honestly M discs aren’t that worse.
- Nition 2y agoI remember our CD drive struggling to even read brand new PC Gamer demo CDs back in the late 90s. Whereas commercial game discs worked fine.
- thih9 2y agoThey are significantly more expensive too.
- justsomehnguy 2y agoLet me travel back in time and...
- Fr0styMatt88 2y agoI remember everyone saying that CDs were rated for 100 years but disc rot seemed to kill that idea.
- DaoVeles 2y agoIt is fascinating seeing in the retro games space just how quickly some are dying. The Gamecube/Ps2/Xbox era is starting to fall to it and I have even seen a handful of Xbox 360/Ps3 games with this issue. Many collectors now request photo's of the discs being back lit to check the integrity before purchasing. And yet there are also a lot of audio CD's from the 80's that are holding on. A big part of it would be the manufacturing quality and how in the name of efficiency and lower prices, some corner may have been cut.
- uncivilized 2y agoThe article states that they were on display in his home but does not mention if they’re still working. The images in the posted article are from other sources.
- zitterbewegung 2y agoOff the shelf optical substrate just degrades and lazerdiscs suffer from this greatly . There is the m disc series that has a more advanced substrate but I believe magnetic tape is the only backup method that can last very long (other than printing it out in paper).
- scrame 2y agoseriously? in college my floppies wouldn't make it across the quad.
- JoBrad 2y agoMy experience with floppy disks is that they don’t last very long.
- leptons 2y agoIs 35 years "very long"? Because we just retrieved data from about 50 old Commodore 64 5 1/4" floppy disks after 35 years. They all read perfectly on an old Commodore 1541 floppy drive.
- lallysingh 2y agoIt depends a lot on situations. I've heard that there's a fungus in the Southern US that slowly eats some floppy disks (or grows on them, I donno). Also there's a luck component with nearby magnetic sources.
- TacticalCoder 2y agoLucky you: as I posted a few hours ago... Only about 2/3rd of mine still worked but then they've been stored, for some, in bad conditions. For example some were in an underground garage with lots of cars passage and, after decades, gunk builds up everywhere in the garage.
- JoBrad 2y agoFrom what I can tell, the upper time limit for magnetic media is generally expected to be 30 years[1]. My money is on survivorship bias for longer time frames. I've had 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies die on me within months of purchase - I don't recall that ever happening for a CD/DVD, but I'm sure someone has had that experience. Anecdotes aren't hard data, but I have 2 CD binders full of CDs and DVDs that have outlasted 3 hard drives that I didn't keep backed up as a young adult, and as long as they were kept away from scratches and heat, all of them were easily read and playable. [1] https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/4life_expectancy https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/4life_expectancy
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DaoVeles 2y agoI was writing a book a few years ago that I have long since shelved, all about the longevity of information. The base premise was a mental experiment, what if we don't succeed in over coming some key fundamental issues of society and we end up in a long term energy decline position. How long would it take to go back into a dark age and just how much would we have preserved. Basically about the life time of SSD's (20 years) , CD's (10-40 years) , Floppy disc/magnetic tapes (5-50 years), vinyl records (30-120 years), books (high/low acid paper)(50-500 years), clay tablets (centuries/millennia) and eventually spoken word (tens/hundreds of millennia). Seeing as how much of the internet has gone dark both through lack of economic incentive or accidental erasure - it was not the most cheery conclusion. About how the more efficient we get with information storage, the more brittle it becomes. But also the longer information can last, the more it is liable to be changed with time. Think like the game of telephone. The big lesson take away I made from it all was that, it isn't so much the medium but the information. If it is useful or cherished, it will live far beyond its original medium. Knowledge of hygiene will live a lot longer than season 3 of Survivor on DVD. Video games are cherished and many are living way beyond their original medium. We will loose 99.99% of all data produced over the last few decades but that it mostly stuff that nobody had any need or desire to keep - and that is totally fine. It is basically a natural filter for quality, and while we may be concerned about what we may loose, ultimately a quality statement will be made. Information about the taxation system of 1956 will not last as long as the I Ching which has already gone millennia.