🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2nn1elF2dlhcU1@uni-berlin.de>, 
"Jack D. Russell, Sr." <jackru$$ell2@notmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>hs>To my horror, I found a remarkable hardware failure  rate of
>hs>floppies, even from large companies like TDK, made (I think )
>hs>after  the mid 80's. My ancient floppies seems to last forever.
>hs>But a newer ``preformatted'' floppy can be   readable/writable
>hs>and then an hour later when I go to a friends house, I find
>hs>his/her PC can not  read the thing. Later,  on examination I find
>hs>scandisk  or some lookalike reporting bad clusters, even at the
>hs>beginning of the floppy  where the boot information is supposed
>hs>to go: Result most programs can not even read enough to scan it
>hs>for errors.
[...]

Even back in the good old days there were commonly problems moving 
floppies from system to system.  Many times one had to walk an 
incoming floppy around the office until finally finding a machine that 
could read it.  (Though in the mid/late 80s I guess this was mainly 
with 5.25" 360K disks around here. :)

I suspect a lot of the problem was in the tolerances for the 
read/write heads.  A disk written on a machine at the edge in one 
direction tended to be unreadable in a machine at the other extreme.

Presumably, the same sort of problem could arise with pre-formatted 
disks?

As for "new" reliability, I typically found about 5 to 10% "bad" out 
of the box when formatting the things years ago (now talking 3.5" 
720K) and haven't really noticed much better or worse with the 
"modern" pre-formatted 1.44MB units here.

Cheers, Phred.

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