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It's amazing (in a bad way) how storage sucked in the 90s, early 2000s Floppy technology sucked even back then. Then we got CDs, which were fine, but read-only

It's amazing (in a bad way) how storage sucked in the 90s, early 2000s Floppy technology sucked even back then. Then we got CDs, which were fine, but read-only Iomega came up with Zip drives only to promptly shoot themselves in the foot instead of standardizing the format and fixing their issues There were also a couple of also-rans that never got much traction USB drives got there but they had to wait for USB and good enough/big enough flash chips to exist

shiroiushi 2y ago
>It's amazing (in a bad way) how storage sucked in the 90s, early 2000s >Floppy technology sucked even back then. No, not "even": floppy technology sucked in the 90s, but it absolutely did NOT suck in the 80s. Floppies were extremely, even ridiculously reliable back in the 80s, and into the early 90s. They totally went to shit in the mid-to-late 90s because the quality of both the media and the drives went down the toilet.
- Tor3 2y ago
  Absolutely agree. Source: I've read (in the last decade) tons of old floppies from (mostly) the late eighties. The recovery rate for 5.25" DD and HD floppies were nearly 100%. I had only a couple of floppies with issues (though it must be said that I know people who have had more problems, but that is always about Really Bad Storage Conditions). But, as I've mentioned before in other threads, this does not translate to 3.5" floppies. Or at least not to HD 3.5" floppies. Even though mine were stored in the same conditions as the 5.25" and 8" floppies, the success rate was really low, and mostly non-existent for "HD" 3.5" floppies (the so-called 1.44MB floppies). The 720KB ones fared much better, but never as good as the older 5.25" ones. Of course that also when the nineties arrived, but more than that - the HD 3.5" floppies stretched the density too high for the medium, according to Chuck(G) and others with more understanding of the physical medium than myself. In any case my experience supports that claim. So, the title of this thread is "Triple Density Floppy, Anyone?" Well, obviously I have no belief in the feasibility of trying even higher density than what existed, with the problems already apparent with the existent densities (mind, the 5.25" ones didn't exceed what was possible). As for other media.. CD-R used to fail reading for me after a year in storage. I quickly stopped using that as any kind of backup. And we all know about flash-based storage.. or at least I hope we all know. They're just like very slowly leaking capacitors. Spinning rust or spinning floppy media or even tape retains data for much longer (yes I have tons of CCTs which are also still readable, from back to the beginning of the eighties)
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I used lots of 1.44MB floppies in the early 90s and generally had few, if any problems, as I recall. But later in the decade, I had more and more trouble, and by the late 90s or early 2000s they could absolutely not be relied upon at all. I wonder if you went through all your HD 3.5" floppies, and sorted them by manufacturing date, if you'd find a trend showing the early ones being more reliable than the later ones.
    - Tor3 2y ago
      It's more like how long it was since they were written - I couldn't find any other pattern (I started reading through old floppies a long time ago). They simply seemed to fade with age.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Yeah, kinda. I remember running into a lot of read errors with the 5¼ disks (I think being floppy also contributed to their unreliability) But yes there was a point in the 90s where quality went down even for the 3½ ones (and that elementary pre-IDE floppy interface certainly didn't help)
dale_glass 2y ago
It's not so much that storage sucked, as the interfaces for storage sucked. We didn't have much you could plug a better drive into. The floppy cable's protocol was too restrictive to support anything much fancier, exposing too many internal details. And the parallel port was awfully slow. And SCSI was unfortunately absent from the consumer hardware. That made it really hard for anyone to make a better storage device, because it'd find itself immediately constrained. It's only in modern times where we finally have technology-agnostic interfaces that make it possible to use any storage tech you like, bandwidth to spare, and a generic USB storage driver meaning that even if you do own some oddball device you can still plug it into any random computer and have it work out of the box.
- immibis 2y ago
  ISA/PCI bus? (And IDE, which is just the ISA bus over a differently shaped cable) In that era, addon cards were quite normal - not like today when the addon card slot is de-facto just a graphics card slot and motherboards are being designed around that assumption.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    No, floppies are not IDE They're this weird interface that sends data byte by byte IIRC (or even worse) Not IDE, it has none of its smartness
    - immibis 2y ago
      No, IDE is not floppies. It's IDE.
      - FullyFunctional 2y ago
        The floppy drive in the Itanium I owned used the IDE interface. Go figure.
tjoff 2y ago
I'm sad to say that usb-drives are now officially shit. They are so unreliable and there is no brand that you can trust. Which truly sucks for the rare cases when you actually do need some form of physical media.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Nowadays a 2TB nvme USB drive that is barely bigger old usb pen drives. I wouldn't call that "officially shit". Also, SD and MicroSD cards are fairly reliable in my experience as long as you don't stretch too much their usable life. But that has always been the case of flash technology and it was even worse in the floppy and CDRW days.
  - tjoff 2y ago
    That is true and that is what I use when I know I'll need one. But they are overkill, expensive and thus as a consequence - not something you have on you when you need it. And for times you need to create a boot disk and similar use-cases there is a lot of value in being able to completely nuke and reformat a drive. Which you might not want to do if you have data on the 2TB drive you'd rather keep. Even if it is only for convenience - which you typically do after a while. And usb-drives you can have a handful of, give one away without care etc. They do have a place and it is a shame we can't trust them (for no good reason).
grishka 2y ago
> Then we got CDs, which were fine, but read-only You could format a CD-RW to use it pretty much like a (slow) USB flash drive. I don't remember the details but it definitely was an option in Windows. But then, before CD burners became popular and blanks cheap, most files I had to carry between computers (e.g. to school or to/from a friend) fit on a floppy. In the rare case they did not, I used WinRAR to make one of those split archives.

shiroiushi 2y ago

>It's amazing (in a bad way) how storage sucked in the 90s, early 2000s >Floppy technology sucked even back then. No, not "even": floppy technology sucked in the 90s, but it absolutely did NOT suck in the 80s. Floppies were extremely, even ridiculously reliable back in the 80s, and into the early 90s. They totally went to shit in the mid-to-late 90s because the quality of both the media and the drives went down the toilet.

Tor3 2y ago
Absolutely agree. Source: I've read (in the last decade) tons of old floppies from (mostly) the late eighties. The recovery rate for 5.25" DD and HD floppies were nearly 100%. I had only a couple of floppies with issues (though it must be said that I know people who have had more problems, but that is always about Really Bad Storage Conditions). But, as I've mentioned before in other threads, this does not translate to 3.5" floppies. Or at least not to HD 3.5" floppies. Even though mine were stored in the same conditions as the 5.25" and 8" floppies, the success rate was really low, and mostly non-existent for "HD" 3.5" floppies (the so-called 1.44MB floppies). The 720KB ones fared much better, but never as good as the older 5.25" ones. Of course that also when the nineties arrived, but more than that - the HD 3.5" floppies stretched the density too high for the medium, according to Chuck(G) and others with more understanding of the physical medium than myself. In any case my experience supports that claim. So, the title of this thread is "Triple Density Floppy, Anyone?" Well, obviously I have no belief in the feasibility of trying even higher density than what existed, with the problems already apparent with the existent densities (mind, the 5.25" ones didn't exceed what was possible). As for other media.. CD-R used to fail reading for me after a year in storage. I quickly stopped using that as any kind of backup. And we all know about flash-based storage.. or at least I hope we all know. They're just like very slowly leaking capacitors. Spinning rust or spinning floppy media or even tape retains data for much longer (yes I have tons of CCTs which are also still readable, from back to the beginning of the eighties)
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I used lots of 1.44MB floppies in the early 90s and generally had few, if any problems, as I recall. But later in the decade, I had more and more trouble, and by the late 90s or early 2000s they could absolutely not be relied upon at all. I wonder if you went through all your HD 3.5" floppies, and sorted them by manufacturing date, if you'd find a trend showing the early ones being more reliable than the later ones.
  - Tor3 2y ago
    It's more like how long it was since they were written - I couldn't find any other pattern (I started reading through old floppies a long time ago). They simply seemed to fade with age.
raverbashing 2y ago
Yeah, kinda. I remember running into a lot of read errors with the 5¼ disks (I think being floppy also contributed to their unreliability) But yes there was a point in the 90s where quality went down even for the 3½ ones (and that elementary pre-IDE floppy interface certainly didn't help)

dale_glass 2y ago

It's not so much that storage sucked, as the interfaces for storage sucked. We didn't have much you could plug a better drive into. The floppy cable's protocol was too restrictive to support anything much fancier, exposing too many internal details. And the parallel port was awfully slow. And SCSI was unfortunately absent from the consumer hardware. That made it really hard for anyone to make a better storage device, because it'd find itself immediately constrained. It's only in modern times where we finally have technology-agnostic interfaces that make it possible to use any storage tech you like, bandwidth to spare, and a generic USB storage driver meaning that even if you do own some oddball device you can still plug it into any random computer and have it work out of the box.

immibis 2y ago
ISA/PCI bus? (And IDE, which is just the ISA bus over a differently shaped cable) In that era, addon cards were quite normal - not like today when the addon card slot is de-facto just a graphics card slot and motherboards are being designed around that assumption.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  No, floppies are not IDE They're this weird interface that sends data byte by byte IIRC (or even worse) Not IDE, it has none of its smartness
  - immibis 2y ago
    No, IDE is not floppies. It's IDE.
    - FullyFunctional 2y ago
      The floppy drive in the Itanium I owned used the IDE interface. Go figure.

tjoff 2y ago

I'm sad to say that usb-drives are now officially shit. They are so unreliable and there is no brand that you can trust. Which truly sucks for the rare cases when you actually do need some form of physical media.

prmoustache 2y ago
Nowadays a 2TB nvme USB drive that is barely bigger old usb pen drives. I wouldn't call that "officially shit". Also, SD and MicroSD cards are fairly reliable in my experience as long as you don't stretch too much their usable life. But that has always been the case of flash technology and it was even worse in the floppy and CDRW days.
- tjoff 2y ago
  That is true and that is what I use when I know I'll need one. But they are overkill, expensive and thus as a consequence - not something you have on you when you need it. And for times you need to create a boot disk and similar use-cases there is a lot of value in being able to completely nuke and reformat a drive. Which you might not want to do if you have data on the 2TB drive you'd rather keep. Even if it is only for convenience - which you typically do after a while. And usb-drives you can have a handful of, give one away without care etc. They do have a place and it is a shame we can't trust them (for no good reason).

grishka 2y ago

> Then we got CDs, which were fine, but read-only You could format a CD-RW to use it pretty much like a (slow) USB flash drive. I don't remember the details but it definitely was an option in Windows. But then, before CD burners became popular and blanks cheap, most files I had to carry between computers (e.g. to school or to/from a friend) fit on a floppy. In the rare case they did not, I used WinRAR to make one of those split archives.