Re: [Finale] OT: old Mac disks

[Carl Donsbach]

Over the past few years diskettes seem to have been getting cheaper in 
price and quality.  Besides the market has been flooded with low priced 
designer color diskettes which fail after a few uses, especially if carried 
around in hip pockets as I sometimes see people doing these days (bad 
storage is, as you suggest, a problem).  A lot of computer users, 
especially newbies, don't seem to take care of equipment as well as they 
did a few years ago when it was more expensive and didn't go obsolete as 
quickly.  Some FD Drives also seem to be more cheaply made than they used 
to be.  None of these things are universal, but they all contribute to a 
general impression of floppies being less reliable than they once were.

Since you have good luck with diskettes, I guess you probably use better 
quality diskettes, take good care of them, and store them properly.

On the other hand a failure rate of 50% on Zip disks is indication that 
something is not right.  I've rarely seen Zips go bad, and when I have seen 
it happen it usually seems to be the fault of a bad drive.

-Carl Donsbach

--On Wednesday, April 21, 2004 10:48 AM -0400 Dennis Bathory-Kitsz 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

At 10:38 AM 4/20/04 +0200, Johannes Gebauer wrote:
Just be careful, floppies are _very_ unreliable for backups.
I've heard this said, but I started using floppies in 1980 (TRS-80 and
Color Computer), and even those are still readable nearly a
quarter-century later. A friend who still has a working 5-inch drive has
been transferring my old articles with no trouble, so I know they're
still good. My 10-year-old PC-based floppies are still fine; I have one
machine with a legacy floppy drive still working, and I've been
transferring material to CDR to consolidate it.
I've had worse luck with Zip disks (50% failure over time with these!),
CDRs, and hard drives than I ever had with floppies.
What gave rise to the idea that floppies were unreliable? Is it just
because they tended to be stored badly? Or was it a system-dependent
recording method?


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