🚀 go-pugleaf

Ian Staples (staplei@planet.ari.dpi.qld.gov.au) wrote:
: Alecto <alecto@goulburn.net.au> writes:
: 
: >The trouble is that thay have stoped making quality 3.5" disks nowdays
: >as the pricepoint of them in the market is too low for quality.
: >If you want to use floppys for long term storage then 1.2m 5.25" disks
: >are the best bet.
: 
: While I don't have a direct comparison of 5.25 versus 3.5, I can
: confirm that the old 5.25" models were pretty good.  About 6 months
: ago I copied files from about a dozen Wabash disks (as sold by the
: then Micro Educational, I think they called themselves) which had
: been used to transfer the files from the PDP-10 at JCU in Sep 1989.
: All files copied perfectly, without a single "stutter" from XCOPY. :-)
: 
: Cheers,  Ian S.

I just bought Lotus 1-2-3 r1A from a thrift shop. It is stored on 320K double-
sided disks and dates from 1983. It actually runs perfectly on a Pentium
and there has been no flaws or retries, just like a brand new record!

I also have another 5.25" which is the Explore the IBM PC from 1984. It always
failed reading some sectors between tracks 11 and 18. I examined it closely
and noticed there was some dirt stucked on the magnetic surface of the floppy. I gently
scrubbed it out with a wet cloth, let it dry, and it's now running perfectly.

I don't find 3.5" less reliable, and wouldn't say it's necessarily more reliable
than 5.25". I've also had 3.5" for years now, and haven't had any problem with them. Ah, but my 3.5" are old too. In my life, I had to discard 2 1.44M,
1 1.2M and 1 360K floppies because they couldn't be reformatted and were
totally unusable. I find it's a really low failure rate for almost 700
floppies used.

However, I trust floppies of any size much more than ZIP disks. At work, my
boss formatted a ZIP disk on his portable, and he attempted to read it the
next day, it was just like an unformatted disk and he had lost his data. I
verified it, and I could only tell him to reformat it. The same thing happened
to me with a different disk on a different drive. So I consider ZIPs good only
for a temporary storage space rather than a backup media, and these only hold
95MB, rather than 100MB as the companies claim.

If you want better media than floppies, I would recommend blank CDs.

Louis-Luc