• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

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

tom.storey

tom.storey

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 18, 2022
Messages
104
Location
London, UK
Hi all.

I recently picked up an IBM XT, but as this is my first vintage machine I am lacking most peripherals and accessories needed for day to day use.

Something I'd like to pick up are some floppy disks.

I'll build our buy an XTIDE type adapter to sort out some more modern bulk storage.

I see various boxes of NOS on the likes of eBay, but I'm wondering:

* are there any brands that are unreliable that I should avoid, or
* are there any particular brands to shoot for due to generally being reliable?

Thanks.
 
Avoid Wabash like smallpox and steer clear of "boutique" brands such as Brown, Elephant, etc.
My go-to brands are 3M/Imation and Sony. Dysan was also quite good back in the day.
 
I prefer Maxell but I have also had good experience with Athana.

Something to keep in mind is that DS/DD disks haven't been manufactured in almost three decades. Even quality NOS disks may be unreliable (or even moldy...) if they were stored in a high temperature or high humidity environment. Unfortunately there is usually no way to know the storage history of something on ebay, so you just have to roll the dice.
 
Tandy (Radio Shack) was infamous for storing items in warehouses without air conditioning. Not good considering the conditions in Texas.

I would suggest examining floppy disk emulators. A few boxes of questionable quality disks would cost the same as the emulator.
 
krebizfan said:
Tandy (Radio Shack) was infamous for storing items in warehouses without air conditioning. Not good considering the conditions in Texas.
Click to expand...
I recall getting a job with over 50 of the 8" ones. SSSD, mostly. Terrible problems--they shed like an angora cat. It was clear that they had not been stored properly.

@Plasma has an important point. Given the time that DSDD floppies have long been out of production, don't be tempted by oddball brands.
 
Last edited:
How are Verbatim in terms of reliability? Being located in Europe the choice doesn't seem to be as huge as it may be in somewhere like the US.

That said I will probably be in the US on business sometime early next year (maybe Q2) so I could order some stuff delivered to the office and bring it back with me, but I wouldn't mind getting my hands on something before then if possible.
 
Verbatim sold several grades of floppies; quality varied between them. Dysan was a well-respected US-made brand, but things went downhill after merging with Xidex. Kodak, at one time, manufactured floppies with the promise to pay for data recovery should one of their disks fail (it was a promotional stunt and didn't last long).

Being in Europe, you may want to investigate BASF floppies. I haven't handled a lot of them, but ones that I did were pretty decent.
 
I've yet to run into a shedding 8"er

Seems to be most common on HD 3.5", they have got to be the most poorly made of all cookies
 
I have, both 8" and 5.25". Aforementioned Wabash were among the worst, right out of the box; the same applies to the Wabash "Mira" 1/2" open-reel tape.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I have, both 8" and 5.25". Aforementioned Wabash were among the worst, right out of the box; the same applies to the Wabash "Mira" 1/2" open-reel tape.
Click to expand...
Yeah for sure, I'm not trying to assert it never happens - just less common on the 8" media. I have run into shedding 5.25" as well


The Athana DS/DD 5.25" media I got from the milsurp store was still shrink wrapped and has been perfect so far.
 
The disks I have that work almost every time have been Verbatim ones. Bought a box of unopened Kodak ones and every disk tried flaked off and gummed up the heads.
 
tom.storey said:
How are Verbatim in terms of reliability?
Click to expand...
Recently I got my hands on many Verbatim 360K disks that were stored in the same way and place. Testing them revealed something interesting: of all the different types that mostly survived, the light blue ones were all bad. It might be a coincidence or not, but given that from 10-15 disks none survived I'd avoid them if I had the option. I don't remember these disk being bad, it must be something related to time.

v2.png
 
The thing I noticed across all brands... floppies from the 80's old diskettes are usually still very good to use but the ones made in the 90s in general; shed, are mouldy more than others and seen them rot through (pinhole in diskettes at random places.) of course, this is only my personal observation, and so far in the last 5 years, I have handled over 1000 5.25" SS and DS floppies.

I Used to buy from Colemans myself, their price was hard to beat, and I noticed they have been out of stock for a while now. I am lucky I have a used electronic store in Houston that gets boxes of Double Density floppies from time to time, and I spend days examining, and formatting in 3 stages to filter great to bad floppies... running them through categories of formatting from 720K (5.25") DSQD, 360K DSDD, and 180K SSDD, then Bin :)
 
Last edited:
Even in the 80s, there were companies selling disks of marginal quality that were rejected for use in the manufacturer's own packaging. The pricing never made sense to me: save 20% but expect that half the disks will not be able to hold a format.
 
I just remembered I had a box of "new" IBM branded DD 3.5" disks that all shed. The IBM branded disks have been otherwise reliable but this particular box was unsealed probably 30 years ago and stored poorly.
 
One factor is the cost of the media. Bear with me, here. A box of 10 8" floppies during the early 1980s was likely to be priced somewhere around $50; early 5.25" floppies were similarly priced. In general, these were pretty good and manufactured domestically. Price competition brought the price down, and ultimately, the quality. Verbatim moved its production from Santa Clara to the Far East in the early 1990s. The same situation obtains, I think, with 3.5" diskettes--the price of a box of 10 3.5" HD floppies in the mid-to-late 1980s was about $50. I remember buying my first box of Fujis at Fry's for about that--and they were the least expensive. Similarly, ED floppies were very expensive, (that $50 thing again), but the price never came down much because there was little demand for them.

It seems to me that as the media cost went down, so did the quality. There are some exceptions. In the late 1970s, I had pretty good success with 5.25" purple-label Verbatims and terrible luck with the pink label ones.

And then there was Wabash...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top