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DS DD 360K 5.25" floppy disks - good vs bad brands?

Hearing lots of the term "shedding", and this isn't something in familiar with...

Is this some kind of defect or age related condition that causes them to basically fall apart?
 
tom.storey said:
Hearing lots of the term "shedding", and this isn't something in familiar with...

Is this some kind of defect or age related condition that causes them to basically fall apart?
Click to expand...
The binder fails so the rusty paint coating falls off the mylar sheet. Sometimes, it comes off in flakes and tapping the disk on a table would result in a pile of rust. That is the better failure mode. The worse failure mode was that the coating would stick to itself and read/write heads would be covered by a ball of goo. The second form often happened with Wabash.

It is a combination of age, poor storage, and incorrect chemical formulation on the binder. No binder will stay intact under all conditions forever but poor treatment will cause failure sooner.
 
And of course, it sticks to the heads of the drive and can then damage disks that would have otherwise been fine.
 
Regardless of the floppy brand, they are all going to have sat around for 30+ years. It is a bad idea to just throw a random untested disk in to a drive. Always carefully inspect the surface of the disk first. If it has any kind of visible residue on the surface, either don't use it or clean it first.
 
Thanks all.

Ive picked up a box of 3M disks, they are coming from the states and I should hopefully have them around christmas.

Fingers crossed they will be ok, and I'll give them all a look over first to make sure they appear fine before sticking them in the drive.

Ive also got an XT-IDE PCB on order that I can build up. The original HDD seems to be working just fine for now, but I guess I'd like to give it a format and run some kind of tool over it to check for bad sectors etc. It would be nice to take a copy of everything that is on there first, though there isnt too much to look at really (some version of McAfee anti-virus, an accounting package called Pegasus, and some mapping/route planning software called Autoroute - it belonged to a transport company, so that all seems to make sense).
 
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