4 ms·
I beg to disagree. A year ago, I fished out my collection of 5 1/4" disks and transferred them to a hard drive. Most of them read okay. On the 3 1/2" front a
by femto 12y ago
I beg to disagree. A year ago, I fished out my collection of 5 1/4" disks and transferred them to a hard drive. Most of them read okay.
On the 3 1/2" front a couple of months ago, I fished out my boxes of 3.5" floppy disks and transferred them to a hard drive, then overwrote them with zeros, effectively doing an exhaustive surface test. Only a small number (single digits) were unreadable, and less than 10% would have had any read errors. Of the 90% that read error free, they all wrote error free.
Going free: 230 x 1.44MB 3 1/2" floppy disks, all recently verified for no bad sectors. Pickup from Sydney, AU. I can also throw in a few 100MB zip disks.
- meepmorp 12y ago> I can also throw in a few 100MB zip disks. I still have a clear memory of just what the click of death sounded like.
- ido 12y agoDefinitely doesn't sit with my subjective memory of what using floppies was like...then again by the mid 90s a pirated game would often take 10+ floppies so with a ~10% failure rate you had a pretty good chance of getting a bad one thus rendering the whole batch useless (couldn't play the game if a single arj/zip file was lost due to bad sectors on its diskette). I also wonder how quick rewriting new content wore them out.