Yes the ones with the hub rings (DDs) formats successfully and do work, and also the HDs successfully formats to 360k but is unstable reading, but now i know that i should never use a HD in a DD drive! And i dont think there is any wrong with the drive when it could read a already formted disk with DOS 2.xx on it, and it did even boot on that disk. But of some reason it does not boot on that disk anymore but can be read when booting to HD.
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Question aboutf formating
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Yes the ones with the hub rings (DDs) formats successfully and do work, and also the HDs successfully formats to 360k but is unstable reading, but now i know that i should never use a HD in a DD drive! And i dont think there is any wrong with the drive when it could read a already formted disk with DOS 2.xx on it, and it did even boot on that disk. But of some reason it does not boot on that disk anymore but can be read when booting to HD.
vwestlife
Veteran Member
I've seen that happen. If FORMAT encounters an error on track 0 side 1, then it assumes it is a single-sided disk and proceeds to format it as 180K single-sided. (If track 0 side 0 has an error, then it fails with the "Track 0 bad or disk unusable" message.)
modem7
10k Member
I am glad that you used the word, "should".
Right now, I am looking at a Fuji Film 5.25" 2S HD floppy that has a hub ring.
Yeah, i was reading that some HD floppy also sometimes has that hub ring.
RWallmow
Veteran Member
I have never seen a HD with a hub-ring 
Learn something new every day.
I have however never seen or heard of a DD without a hub ring, but you never know what you will find.
Learn something new every day.I have however never seen or heard of a DD without a hub ring, but you never know what you will find.
MikeS
Veteran Member
The thinner coating tends to make 5.25" HD diskettes slightly translucent.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
I have never seen a HD with a hub-ring
I have however never seen or heard of a DD without a hub ring, but you never know what you will find.
Got samples of each--particularly the DD without rings. The DD case is interesting and can be laid squarely on two issues:
1. The motor on 5.25" drives is a DC motor and made controllable by software. 8" drives usually had mains-powered AC motors (but not all--later half-height ones sometimes used DC motors). If you insert a disk in a 5.25" when the motor power is off and the drive doesn't have the "spin on insertion" circuitry, much of the time, the hub area will get wrinkled and the floppy may not seat correctly.
2. Micropolis had their own clamping mechanism which did the hub-mangling thing better than any other drive until they modified the drive to turn on the motor when the door begins to close. We battled that one hard and one day, the factory rep showed up with a kit consisting of rings and a jig to install them on floppies. After that, they were standard features on Verbatim and Dysan floppies--and other manufacturers followed.
3. By the time the HD 5.25" drives showed up, the drive clamping problem had largely been solved, so there was no need for the rings on HD media, though some manufacturers initially put them on anyway.
vwestlife
Veteran Member
I have seen non-HD 5.25" floppies without the hub ring. However, they were all single-sided disks that were originally used with non-PC systems (Atari 8-bit, TRS-80, etc.). I have also encountered some disks where the hub ring came loose, so rather than risk it getting stuck in the drive, I just took it off, and the disk continued to work fine without it.
And I have encountered some 5.25" drives which tend to wrinkle the floppy if you yank down on the lever or door too quickly when the computer is turned off -- perhaps another reason why most manufacturers told you to wait until after turning on the computer to insert a disk (in addition to the potentially-data-corrupting electromagnetic spike that might occur when you first switch on the power).
And I have encountered some 5.25" drives which tend to wrinkle the floppy if you yank down on the lever or door too quickly when the computer is turned off -- perhaps another reason why most manufacturers told you to wait until after turning on the computer to insert a disk (in addition to the potentially-data-corrupting electromagnetic spike that might occur when you first switch on the power).
Chuck(G)
25k Member
As a curious legacy item, note that 3.5" drives spin the motor briefly when a disk is inserted, just to get the metal hub indexed to the spindle mechanism.
Trixter
Veteran Member
It's nuggets like this that I'm glad I subscribe to this forum.
I'm curious what you thought of the 3.5" "HD hole" punching machines to "double your diskette capacity for free!". (Joking -- I know what you think of them.) One of the advertising blurbs at the time was "We wrote and read the diskette continuously for 30 days without a single byte of lost data!"... What the advert failed to mention was what happened when you tried to read that disk six months later.
I own a punching apparatus not for practical use but rather as a museum piece.
luvit
Experienced Member
I had a long term positive experience with those. i understand i shouldn't have had such good luck, but i did.
in 1992 i bought 100 used disks for a few dollars and converted all of them. i used the floppies for for 8 years or longer.
i never bought 3.5" floppies again after that.
Stone
10k Member
I couldn't agree with you less!
I just pulled 25 disks that I punched, formatted and then wrote to between 1988 and 1994. They all read and tested perfectly. That's 20 to 25 years of storage without any data loss. That kinda puts your 'six months later' statment in question, doesn't it? I understand that not everyone and not every media will realize this type of success rate with this particular issue but even some HD media will fail within six months without needing to have a hole punched to double it's existing storage capacity.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Well, when DSHD floppies were $50 (1984 dollars) per box of 10, I did resort to stacking up a bunch of 2Ds on my drill press table and drilling a 1/8" hole right through the stack. They worked for a time, but one by one, started failing. I don't think I have a single one from that time. Of course, I don't have a single one of the $50/box floppies either.
One thing that interests me is the use of HD media in ED mode. Again, new ED disks were expensive and some folks claimed that they could format up HDs to 2.88M and they worked just fine. Unlike the DD-HD case, ED media is quite different from HD media--for one, the coating is usually barium ferrite, not iron oxide.
Does anyone have any surviving HD floppies recorded in ED mode?
One thing that interests me is the use of HD media in ED mode. Again, new ED disks were expensive and some folks claimed that they could format up HDs to 2.88M and they worked just fine. Unlike the DD-HD case, ED media is quite different from HD media--for one, the coating is usually barium ferrite, not iron oxide.
Does anyone have any surviving HD floppies recorded in ED mode?
offensive_Jerk
Veteran Member
$50 in 1984 has the same purchasing power as $117.06 in 2014.
Each disk was almost $12 (2014 dollars)!
How did anyone afford computer stuff in the 80's?
lowen
Veteran Member
It wasn't easy.
I remember as a high school student in 1983 buying a plastic flip-pack of two Maxell DSDD 5.25 diskettes for $10 or so, and that $10 was pretty hard to come by. Those diskettes, formatted with TRS-80 Model III TRSDOS 1.3, still read fine, too, with my catweasel. Some CDC diskettes bought at the same time (for just as much money, too!) shed oxide and end up looking like a CD that's gone through the microwave for 30 seconds on high power. And the older Tandy/Radio Shack media has lasted well, too. You can even look at the old RS catalogs of the day at http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/ ; a three-pack in 1983 would cost you $13.95, for TRS-80 branded single-sided certified media.
As far as formats go, PC's and Clones have it easy; there aren't that many. When you get to other systems the formats get more esoteric rather quickly.
What's always been a stumbling stone, in the non-PC world at least, is the 'density' moniker to distinguish between FM and MFM encoding; 'High Density' is MFM recorded at double the bit rate (and on the 5.25 at 360RPM versus DD's 300RPM); 'Quad Density' like used in the Tandy/TRS-80 2000's drives was DSDD 80 track for 720K (and I know the T2K isn't a 'PC Clone' but it is an MS-DOS machine nonetheless).
The DEC RX50 is fun, and those disks, as I recall, did not have hub rings, but the dual RX50 drive, again, as I recall, was pretty good about properly clamping and centering the cookie in the sleeve and drive. Those disks also have a bit of an odd format, and with the DEC Rainbow that could run its own MS-DOS on the RX50, that is somewhat on-topic.... just make sure you remember to put the bottom diskette in bottom-side-up!
And as far is 'cheaping out' on disks is concerned, I have more than a couple of flippies that are still readable. If you're not familiar with that term, that's using both sides of a diskette in single sided drives by cutting another index hole and write enable hole in the sleeve, and flipping the diskette over to use the top side. If done with real double-sided media it worked fine every time I tried it. The drives on the TRS-80 were single-sided anyway, and it saved money to use the otherwise unusable side. There are some 'dangers' we were all warned about back in the day, but with DS media I never had a problem with sleeve 'grain' or any of the other maladies everyone feared.
Of course, IBM shipped the TM100-2 double-sided drive (or equivalents) and flippies never really caught on in clone-space like they did in C64 world, Apple universe, and Tandy land.
I remember as a high school student in 1983 buying a plastic flip-pack of two Maxell DSDD 5.25 diskettes for $10 or so, and that $10 was pretty hard to come by. Those diskettes, formatted with TRS-80 Model III TRSDOS 1.3, still read fine, too, with my catweasel. Some CDC diskettes bought at the same time (for just as much money, too!) shed oxide and end up looking like a CD that's gone through the microwave for 30 seconds on high power. And the older Tandy/Radio Shack media has lasted well, too. You can even look at the old RS catalogs of the day at http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/ ; a three-pack in 1983 would cost you $13.95, for TRS-80 branded single-sided certified media.
As far as formats go, PC's and Clones have it easy; there aren't that many. When you get to other systems the formats get more esoteric rather quickly.
What's always been a stumbling stone, in the non-PC world at least, is the 'density' moniker to distinguish between FM and MFM encoding; 'High Density' is MFM recorded at double the bit rate (and on the 5.25 at 360RPM versus DD's 300RPM); 'Quad Density' like used in the Tandy/TRS-80 2000's drives was DSDD 80 track for 720K (and I know the T2K isn't a 'PC Clone' but it is an MS-DOS machine nonetheless).
The DEC RX50 is fun, and those disks, as I recall, did not have hub rings, but the dual RX50 drive, again, as I recall, was pretty good about properly clamping and centering the cookie in the sleeve and drive. Those disks also have a bit of an odd format, and with the DEC Rainbow that could run its own MS-DOS on the RX50, that is somewhat on-topic.... just make sure you remember to put the bottom diskette in bottom-side-up!
And as far is 'cheaping out' on disks is concerned, I have more than a couple of flippies that are still readable. If you're not familiar with that term, that's using both sides of a diskette in single sided drives by cutting another index hole and write enable hole in the sleeve, and flipping the diskette over to use the top side. If done with real double-sided media it worked fine every time I tried it. The drives on the TRS-80 were single-sided anyway, and it saved money to use the otherwise unusable side. There are some 'dangers' we were all warned about back in the day, but with DS media I never had a problem with sleeve 'grain' or any of the other maladies everyone feared.
Of course, IBM shipped the TM100-2 double-sided drive (or equivalents) and flippies never really caught on in clone-space like they did in C64 world, Apple universe, and Tandy land.
krebizfan
Veteran Member
Buy cassette tapes. Cheap, cheap, cheap. That covered the home market.
It didn't take long for floppy diskettes to drop in price as production increased. Just was not prudent to be an early adopter of new high capacity disks, made that much worse with all the teething problems initial production models had.
Remember how small documents were before graphics became common. A box of floppies could cover years of work for one person. Storage capacities increase, price per megabyte declines, and systems need more storage for better looking documents; the net result is the preferred amount of storage has kept about the same cost over the past 30 years.
MikeS
Veteran Member
AOL probably did more than anybody to bring diskette (and CD) prices down, not to mention a free source of diskettes for the rest of us.
Interesting tidbits from http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/
No one else has mentioned it yet so I will. There are incompatibilities between the write field strength and track width on 360k (48 tpi) and 1.2m (96 tpi) drives.
This is explained in detail here: http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html#thin
The worst case scenario in my experience is when you write a high strength half width 1.2m track right down the middle of a low strength 360k track. Neither drive will be able to reliably do anything with that track ever again until you throw the disk away in disgust or bulk erase it.
Back in my Heathkit H89 days I had a rig that allowed me to add the hub rings to disks that didn't come with them. The presence or absence of the hub ring doesn't really tell you much about the disk itself or how it was formatted (if at all) at the factory. I too have one of the punches that allowed you to make 1.44m disks out of 720k disks. some of them wouldn't work right off the bat, some are still good after 20 years. I also have had 1.44m disks bought bulk at the big box stores that curiously all had the same "random" volume number assigned when they were "formatted" somewhere in China. Those disks weren't worth a tinkers damn brand new out of the box.
This is explained in detail here: http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html#thin
The worst case scenario in my experience is when you write a high strength half width 1.2m track right down the middle of a low strength 360k track. Neither drive will be able to reliably do anything with that track ever again until you throw the disk away in disgust or bulk erase it.
Back in my Heathkit H89 days I had a rig that allowed me to add the hub rings to disks that didn't come with them. The presence or absence of the hub ring doesn't really tell you much about the disk itself or how it was formatted (if at all) at the factory. I too have one of the punches that allowed you to make 1.44m disks out of 720k disks. some of them wouldn't work right off the bat, some are still good after 20 years. I also have had 1.44m disks bought bulk at the big box stores that curiously all had the same "random" volume number assigned when they were "formatted" somewhere in China. Those disks weren't worth a tinkers damn brand new out of the box.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
MikeS
Veteran Member
Actually, I thought Mike's link in post #10 mentioned and explained it quite clearly:
As to
Bulk erasing is certainly preferred, but most of the time an HD drive will be able to read an HD track on top of a DD track (there are erased guard bands on both sides of a track), and reformatting on a DD drive (several times if necessary) will often make the disk usable again.
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