• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Best and worst floppy disk brands.

generic486

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 30, 2012
Messages
290
Location
Australia
My personal favorite brands for reliabilty are 3M, Dysan, BASF, Nashua, Xidex, Control Data, Verbatim. Never had any problems with any of those brands.
But the best brand floppy sleeve goes to Memorex. So cool
Disk8Memorex.JPG


The worst floppy brand I used was Platinum by Syncom, horrible disks. Always shed and if they don't they have tons of bad sectors.
What are your personal best and worst disk brand?
 
Last edited:
For some reason I've had terrible luck with Sony branded disks, the 3.5" HD ones especially. Almost every single one of them has gone bad, and we're not talking just a few... over the past few months I've thrown out a couple hundred of them and only have three or four left that still work. A lot of 'em wouldn't even format, I'd just get read/write errors.

Most of the other major brands seem to work well though. I've got a mix of all sorts of different ones, and the only ones that have stood out in any way are the Sonys. Oddly, most of the re-purposed AOL disks I have are still fine too... I dunno who made 'em.
 
I've got lots of disks of all kinds and some of the best have been the reformatted/overlabled, like the ones that I sell in my sig. These are bulk disks from companies like Sierra, Lotus, IBM, etc., that were never sold as the originals and then bought up by resellers who reformatted and relabled them as blank disks. It makes sense that if a disk worked initially it stands a good chance that it will work again (and again) when reformatted. I have found that to be true and over time I have bought tens of thousands of these disks.
 
Best: Dysan
Worst: Wabash (and lots of runners-up)

IIRC, Verbatim had more than one level of offerings. The "pink label" disks were awful; the "purple label" ones were much better. CDC and Radio Shack-branded floppies were very varaiable. Brown Disk was nothing to be proud of. My list is very, very, long.

I should add that I still see lots of old floppies today, many from the 1970s.
 
I've used many different brands of 5.25", 8", and 3.5" floppy and minifloppy disks and the ones that always seemed to vary in quality were the Verbatims (5.25" and 8"). in 3.5" disks, the quality in general was never as high as the larger sized disks, and I have had many more failures that I ever did with the larger sizes, including just about all brands. At the begnning, the quality was uniformly bad, at the end, it was much better (5.25" and 8"), and sometimes with the consolidation of manufacturers, you didn't have a choice when buying.

Platinum was a relatively late brand coming to market, launching in 1982 with 5.25" minifloppy disks in 48tpi. I remember them because their promotion offered to Seller for signing up to sell their brand of disks was a complete boxed reproduction set of the Original Beatles Albums on vinyl. I was working as the Assistant Manager at the Heathkit in LA when the Platinum Brand was introduced. In charge of Non-Heath Products, and Inventory for the whole store among other duties, I was the one at the store that controlled the product mix and inventory of producted marketed and sold by the store. The Promotional Set of Beatles Records were produced by Sony without any marking on the jacket, sleeve, or record that I ever saw that would standout, marking them as reproductions. Very High Quality, I still have the set I got when I was working at the LA Heathkit in around 1982.

The initial floppy disks very very high quality and the box was heavy and better designed than other brands. Later, the actually disk and boxes got cheapened. If you had problems with Platinums, I would expect that they were the later production ones. The ones I bought were marked DSDD, and were 48tpi, but I have used them for everything up to 1.2mb, and they still work perfectly to date. In 30 years of use, I've only thrown away one as defective (and that was over 20 years ago).
 
I had BASF gone bad faster than everything else (Elephant, Memorex, Wabash, Maxell, lots and lots of swap-meet no-brand bulk generics) A lot of people swore by Dysan, though I've always considered them to be severely overpriced.
 
I had BASF gone bad faster than everything else (Elephant, Memorex, Wabash, Maxell, lots and lots of swap-meet no-brand bulk generics) A lot of people swore by Dysan, though I've always considered them to be severely overpriced.

The folks at Dysan were very concerned about their quality, but maybe not so much after they moved manufacturing operations offshore. Their technical support was excellent. I bought my first box of 8" floppies in the 70s for about $50--that was for ten. Curiously, that was about the same price I paid for my first box of Fuji DSHD 3.5" floppies--and my first box of 3M DSED floppies.

I don't buy new disks but have hundreds, if not thousands of used sitting in the recycling pile. Wabash 5.25" floppies show the greatest by far rate of failure of the binder--so much so, that I charge extra for recovering data (with no guarantees for either the media or the operation). Apparently, Wabash was well aware of the binder issues and responded not by reformulating the binder, but by reducing prices.

You know, I still have some Kodak "lifetime guarantee--if it fails, we'll recover the data for free" 5.25" floppies. I wonder if they'd make good on the guarantee?
 
Pfft, that just means the company is more affordable to buy and then continue on the service. j/k I was going to mention the similar claims of a lot of media manufacturers were if you found a bad disk they would send you a replacement for free. Given since the media is probably no longer being manufactured it's probably a loss in general. The news claimed 3.5" disks weren't being made any more but I never followed up on that story. Our Goodwill certainly thinks 3.5" disks are made of gold per their horrible pricing.
 
Best was Dysan by far.

Syncom is also at the bottom of my list. There were Syncom Ectype disks that actually sounded like sandpaper in my drives.
 
Not too likely since they're in bankruptcy.

Chapter 11 reorganization--they're still doing business. AFAIK Chapter 11 doesn't relieve them of consumer obligations; it's just that there's a bankruptcy court overseeing the re-organization. I've done plenty of business with outfits in Chapter 11 and always got paid in a timely manner.
 
Wabash disks didn't seem to last too long in my experience either.

I've found by far the biggest factor though is how they have been stored. Those that have been stored in a damp environment tend to be history. Even Verbatim and 3-M disks succumb to mould and mildew.

Tez
 
I have not had much problems with 3.5 disks but oddly BASF are the best for 5.25 but the worst for 3.5HD but these disks were made at the new EMTEC plant and they have bad sectors straight out of the box. However, I had some Russian floppies that were variable. The ones that said something like U30M were horrible but the ones that said DMA-130 were excellent, never had a bad sector on it ever. The Verbatim disks I am talking about are the late 1989 ones with the red V with the blue dots. Those were really good. Never shed oxide.
 
Last edited:
Also, hows the reliability of KAO disks? they are the cheapest DSDD disks I can find. I have loads of NIB 5.25 HD disks (nashua ones) but only about 20 DSDD disks. I have even less 720k disks but that isn't a problem, just tape the hole.
 
I remember a 5.25" test from the early 1980's in which Commodore's own floppy disks called PET-DISK and VIC-DISK were awarded the title worst floppy disks on the market. I have a few of those, but from empirical testing I can't say if it is true. Personally I can't remember any particularly bad brand, but found that most noname disks were just as good as the average brand disks.
 
BEST = For 5.25" pre HD diskettes, I'd say BASF, Verbatim, and 3M. One of the most notable diskettes I still have is a 30 year old 3M Diskette formatted to FAT with 160K availible (it's SINGLE sided!!!) and it has a copy of Sharedata Wheel of Fortune on it.

For 3.5" diskettes, the 720K category goes to whatever was used by Lucasfilm Games (now Lucas Arts)...my 1990 VGA edition of The Secret Of Monkey Island is still safely stored in the original battle-worn box with those 100% working unscathed HD 720K Diskettes that I've been slapping onto my family's computers since I was 12 years old and the 486 was king, almost 20 years later.

For the 1.44MB, 3M still comes out tops with Maxell being my 2nd choice, I still use some of those Diskettes...and they rode in my pocket all over Tiger Town (Auburn) Alabama as a teenager, as I sweat my butt off in 115 degree record breaking summer heat, porting along Emulators, DOS Games, and Graphics I'd nab from the internet at Auburn University library before we had internet at home (and before they forced you to login on the computers at the library).

The Worst goes to KAO Diskettes (the WORST). I paid a dollar for 50 of these back in 2005 at Goodwill, I see why they were 50 for a dollar, out of 50, only 3 worked, and two of the three were only functional as 720K diskettes.
 
I'd heard somewhere that Tandy had an un-climate-controlled warehouse in Ft. Worth that they stashed a load of 8" floppies in, with the result that the disks got quite literally cooked. Tandy went and sold them anyway with terrible results. I believe I have a box of those--stock number 26-4906, with the price sticker on them $44.95--every one a disaster.

Other than the Tandy disks, the only other 8" floppies I've had terrible results with have been oddball brands, made by someone else, for example "Wright Line" floppies. Those of you who played a lot with 7- and 9-track 1/2" tape will surely remember Wright Line.
 
For 5.25" I like BASF
For 3.5" Maxell

I have about 400 NIB Imation 3.5" disks, almost all are bad...if you see any Imation floppies for sale run away...
 
Not too likely since they're in bankruptcy.
Reminds me of the lifetime warranty that came with ZipChip. One time I called them (this was in early 90s) about a failed chip; they flatly denied responsibility.

"How long have you had it?"
"About three years."
"You got three years of use out of it. What more do you want?"
"But you said it carries life time warranty"
"Click."
 
Back
Top