Subj : Re: Floppy disks
To   : bbsing
From : Spectre
Date : Wed Aug 23 2023 13:04:00

 bb> I got curious about the lifetime warranty on some floppy disk, brand new
 bb> in a box.

 bb> I've tested a floppy disk 3.5 for several months to see if I could get the
 bb> disk to fail due to writing to it and overwriting the data. I used a linux
 bb> system with an attached USB floppy drive, I wrote over a million times to
 bb> the disk and read back what was written perfectly. Then after about
 bb> 4 months errors appeared. I stopped the program (bash script using
 bb> dd), and started inspecting the log. I found I couldn't read the
 bb> disk anymore... so I was almost set to turn off the system,

There's a few things that spell the end for floppies... Mold for one, who'd
had thought that'd be a thing.. what are they feeding on?  If you left the
mold long enough presumably it'd eat something out of the surface.  But sans
that mold either needs to be cleaned off the surface carefully or the drive
head will eat it, become filthy and won't read.

The more likely problem, like HD's will be bit rot... eventually losing
random magnetic data.

Just for giggles, 8bit shack is sourcing floppys from somewhere.  They're
still putting out A2 software.

Spec


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