Floppy media recommendations (was: the floppy thread)

[carangil]

So, I have a 486 with a 3.5 inch floppy drive.

I was putting in a new HD, and needed to make a boot floppy. I had so much trouble with this! I took a stack of random old floppies of mine, that don't have any data I care about, and tried to format them. I also tried them in my non-vintage k6 machine's floppy drive.

I've found this:

-Most of the old ones were ok
-The really old ones were garbage
-Most of the more modern ones (early 2000's) would either refuse to format, or formatted full of bad spots.

I finally succeeded at getting a good boot disk and got a basic DOS install on the HD, just enough to load CD drivers and load everything else via the more reliable optical media.

I would now like to clean (or perhaps replace) the floppy drives in both machines, and get a good stock of disks.

Can anyone recommend a good brand of source of 3.5 inch floppies? Should I try to buy old unopened packages from the 90's? Are any of the boxes for sale currently in stores (say the back corner of Fry's) have a chance of being good?

I think what it comes down to is should I try a) new, but crap, media or b) quality, but aged media. Both sound kinda dubious in reliability. Or, am I barking up the wrong tree, and should switch over to 5.25 media?

I suppose what Im asking, is, If you were to format a DOS boot disk and hide the disk somewhere, when you find it a couple years from now, which type of disk would you expect to still boot?

 

[Lutiana]

Frys sells 1.44Mb 3.5" disks and drives. They are cheap. And the few that I have bought were not that bad, and I am still using them.

If you are looking for something a bit more out dated (such as 720k disks and drive) then I'd check out Ebay.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Most 1.44MB DSHD floppies are and were pretty awful. The box of Fuji floppies that I originally paid $50 for never survived. I'm currently using TDKs, but I don't count on them for anything critical. DSED (2.88M) are even worse.

On the other hand, DS2D (720K) diskettes are generally pretty reliable. If you need to use 3.5" floppies, you may want to consider using those.

8" floppies are very reliable, on the other hand. Just finished converting a batch of those written in 1983.

 

[Lutiana]

I use winimage and have created an archive of disk images. That way when I pull them out and the disk is bad, I just toss it and use a new one re-creating it. Works well.

Whats even better Norton Commander 5+ has some diskimaging tools built into it, so I can then download the disk image from my main machine (via FTP) and then use NC to re-create the disk on my 486. In in the reverse I can then use the 486 to create images of any disk size (360k + 1.2Mb 5.25", 720k, 1.44 and 2.88 3.5" disks) and upload them via FTP onto my main machine. This process actually allows for some very flexible disk editing and tweaking, and is far more reliable than leaving the data on to disks themselves.

 

[carangil]

Re-creating the disks as they fail seems the way to go. I got a k6-2 with a floppy drive; I can use that as a 'floppy archive.' (Currently I have a 486 w/ hdd, so having a working floppy isn't an issue until I need a boot disk for some reason. But I'd like to get into older systems soon, and then I'll definitely need a reliable floppy solution.)

When I was a kid, I used to play games off of 3.5 inch disks on out 286 all the time. My dad wouldn't let me keep games on the HDD because the drive was so small, so I had to put everything on floppies. The same games played off the same disks over and over, and never had a problem.

Fast forward to around 1999, 2001 or so. I buy a box of 10 floppies. Within a week, at least 2 are bad. Was it poor media, or just poor drives? Both?

 

[Tetrium]

.....DSED (2.88M) are even worse.

Do you happen to have any more information about these disks? Any personal experience with them is most welcome, it's realy hard to find any good information about people using these disks.
I bought a whole bunch of 2.88M disks years ago (IBM brand) new in the package and haven't had any real problems with them yet regarding bad sectors and such.
I have been very meticulous about storing them in the best condition (stable temps and not in sunlight and near moist). I was veeery lucky to have found those disks new when I did, these disks seem to be even more rare then SSDD ones!!

Oh btw, I also bought a single disk TDK 2.88M years ago new (just got one, they wanted €2 per disk) and that disk has gone realy bad unfortunately. The IBM ones seem to be in much better condition after having had them for years now.


Back on topic:
I think that important is how floppy disks are stored. On occasion when a floppy formats with just a couple bad clusters I'll try a reformat. About half the times it will format without any errors the second time.
Sometimes when I get realy many bad formats I'll try a different floppy drive just to make sure the drive is ok.
On the other hand I have so many spare floppydisks by now, whenever a floppydisk is obviously bad after a reformat, I'll just toss it in the bin

Winimage is realy great! I also keep all my floppy boot images stored on my harddrive incase the original floppy goes bad (doesn't happen that much) or I 'misplace' the disk (happens all the time aik!)

 

[Chuck(G)]

DSED disks are barium ferrite, not iron oxide, so they can't (and shouldn't) be used in regular HD drives. I don't know that the media cost ever came down much and I suspect that was one factor that killed it off--as well as not really being able to upgrade old equipment to handle it--controllers that could do the 1MHz data rate when this came out were kind of rare. At about the same time, we had the Imation LS-120 drives coming out, which were much faster (IDE interface) with vastly more capacity, even if the media was expensive.

I may still have the documentation for the Teac FD-235J drive.

 

[carangil]

I have never seen a 2.88 MB floppy drive in my life, but have always seen support for it in the BIOS settings. I also hear they were crap for reliability. BUT, I think the best thing that came out of 2.88 MB drives, is that it was just common enough for DOS to end up supporting it, so now when you boot a more modern PC via CD (which contains an emulated floppy image), we can now cram 2.88 MB of stuff onto the boot disk image instead of just 1.44!

 

[Lutiana]

so now when you boot a more modern PC via CD (which contains an emulated floppy image), we can now cram 2.88 MB of stuff onto the boot disk image instead of just 1.44!

I built myself a utility CD at some point that allowed for selecting of Floppy images to boot from (ie it gave you a menu, you pick the one you want and it boots that image). Somehow I used Winimage to create 5mb floppy image, crammed NC 5.51 into it and low and behold it worked just fine.

On another note about winimage, it allows you to create and modify any disk images, and supports a large variety of formats, 160kb all the way to 2.88, and some non-standard ones (820k, 1.72Mb, 1.68Mb, DMF (cluster 1024) and DMF (cluster 2048)). It won't let you create ISO images, but I believe that it can read them and allows for file injection and extraction from said ISOs. I highly recommend that anyone who does anything with disks should have WinImage. I am using an older version (6.10) on Windows 7 x64 and it works perfectly. The latest version is 8.1 and costs only $30.

But back on topic. In the 20 years that I have worked with computers I have never found any removable storage reliable enough for long term storage (save maybe CD-Roms). I don't trust magnetic disks, or thumb drives. My most vital information is stored on CDs, DVDs and hard drives (in raid configurations). Disk would always wear out on me, or fail to work at that critical moment and leave me screaming obscenities at my monitor. Hence my reliance on disk images on a RAID 5 volume on my server and my periodic CD backups.

EDIT: Just upgrade to WinImage 8.5, and I like what I see, though I have not delved too deeply yet. I did notice that you can now create your own custom images, here is a screen shot of the options:

​

The drop downs are: Filesystem: FAT12/16 or FAT32 and Sectors per Cluster: 4/8/16/32/64 or 128

 

[glitch]

+1 vote for WinImage. Alcohol 120% is also a great tool for CD and DVD archiving as it can handle most copy protection.

I've had mostly the same experiences, especially with regards to new-made 1.44 MB disks being far more unreliable than NOS 1.44 MB disks. I've stopped buying them new, and usually just grab lots of miscellaneous disks from eBay. 720 KB disks and 360 KB 5.25" disks I almost never have trouble with, as long as they've been taken care of.

I've also noticed that if a 5.25" drive was ever written in a DSDD drive, it's about impossible to format without read errors in a DSHD drive. I've read that this is due to incomplete track erasure since the HD drives use much narrower tracks, which makes sense.

As far as long term storage strategies, I store a lot of stuff on magneto-optical disks. They have the advantage of being re-writable many times (up to 1M for good brands), but are not susceptable to magnetic fields at room temperature. They're also housed in a hard protective case, which makes it less likely the actual disk will be damaged. I've got a 1.3 GB SCSI unit from Fujitsu in my desktop, which I make daily backups of critical stuff to. I've also got an external 230 MB Fujitsu I use with my older Mac equipment for making backups. The disks are supposed to have a data retention life of 50 years. Aside from that, I do bulk backups of archival data to tape...I recently picked up a grocery bag of 24 GB DDS-3 tapes from the local YMCA for $6, which should keep me stocked for a while. As long as tape is properly maintained, it's still one of the most economical long-term bulk backup solutions.

 

[sombunall]

I've also noticed that if a 5.25" drive was ever written in a DSDD drive, it's about impossible to format without read errors in a DSHD drive. I've read that this is due to incomplete track erasure since the HD drives use much narrower tracks, which makes sense.

Funny I never had trouble with that. If you do have trouble couldn't you just do this in linux with a 360k drive:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fd0

which would zero all sectors on the first floppy drive.
Also I have 2 360k floppy drives. One is a toshiba and the other an old alps. The alps has a wider track width than the toshiba so I always format floppies with it then I can read it in any drive including 1.2M.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I'm not exactly sure what glitch is referring to, but here's what I've found.

A degaussed floppy skip-track formatted in a 96 tpi drive will work fine in a 48 tpi drive. However, if there was residual data on the odd-numbered 96 tpi tracks or data left over from being written on a 48 tpi drive, you'll run into trouble if you write/format the disk skip-track fashion in a 96 tpi drive and then try to read it in a 48 tpi unit.

Just common sense, if you think about it.

 

[Lutiana]

I'm not exactly sure what glitch is referring to, but here's what I've found.

A degaussed floppy skip-track formatted in a 96 tpi drive will work fine in a 48 tpi drive. However, if there was residual data on the odd-numbered 96 tpi tracks or data left over from being written on a 48 tpi drive, you'll run into trouble if you write/format the disk skip-track fashion in a 96 tpi drive and then try to read it in a 48 tpi unit.

Just common sense, if you think about it.

So in essence you're saying format 360k disks in a 360k drive and 1.2mb disks in a 1.2mb drive?

 

[MikeS]

So in essence you're saying format 360k disks in a 360k drive and 1.2mb disks in a 1.2mb drive?

No; think of them as a special DD/in/HD format. My rule of thumb (effectively same as Chuck's):

If you're going to be writing to DD disks in an HD (or QD) drive, start with bulk-erased DD disks, format and write to them only in the HD drive, and label them so you won't inadvertently write to them in a DD drive; no problem reading them in either drive then.

Of course HD disks will only work in an HD drive.

 

[Lutiana]

Ahh, makes sense.

What about formatting a DD disk in a DD drive and then writing to it with a HD drive, any issues there?

 

[Chuck(G)]

Back when I was doing computer forensics training, I'd pass out a bunch of 5.25" DSDD floppies to the students and ask them to find some piece of information. This was about 1988 or so, so 5.25" drives were still common on systems--except that almost all by that time were 1.2MB units. I had a DOS driver that would write two 360K floppy images; one on the even tracks and one on the odd tracks. It was a lot of fun seeing how long it took the students to tumble to the fact that there were actually two images on the floppy as DOS (and, by extension, Norton Utilities and similar packages) never looked at the odd-numbered tracks.

Those were much simpler times. :sigh:

 

[MikeS]

Ahh, makes sense.

What about formatting a DD disk in a DD drive and then writing to it with a HD drive, any issues there?

Definitely asking for trouble, especially if you intend to read it in the DD drive. Aside from the different magnetic characteristics there is the difference in track width; when you write on a DD-formated disk with the narrower HD head it essentially puts a stripe down the centre and leaves residual data on either side, and when you read that with the wide DD head you'll pick that up along with the desired data in the centre of the track.

Here's a good writeup by someone who knows a fair bit about disks ;-) :
http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/guzis.html

Especially the "Actual Experience" section.

 

[Lutiana]

Definitely asking for trouble, especially if you intend to read it in the DD drive. Aside from the different magnetic characteristics there is the difference in track width; when you write on a DD-formated disk with the narrower HD head it essentially puts a stripe down the centre and leaves residual data on either side, and when you read that with the wide DD head you'll pick that up along with the desired data in the centre of the track.

That actually explains a few issues I have been having with my XT and my 486 with disks. The XT has a DD drive and the 486 has an HD drive. You learn something new (old?) every day.

Here's a good writeup by someone who knows a fair bit about disks ;-) :
http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/guzis.html

Especially the "Actual Experience" section.

Is that the same Chuck as above by any chance?

 

[MikeS]

That actually explains a few issues I have been having with my XT and my 486 with disks. The XT has a DD drive and the 486 has an HD drive. You learn something new (old?) every day.

Yup; keep at least one DD disk specifically for moving stuff from the 486 to the XT and never write on it in the XT and you shouldn't have any problem (aside from the usual ones of course).

Is that the same Chuck as above by any chance?

I ain't sayin'

 

[carangil]

Ok, so I think I'm going to venture into 5.25" drive land. It seems 360k is the most reliable, but a little too tiny for my needs. I remember when I was a kid, my 1.44 disks went bad occasionally, but my 1.2M disks never went bad. I would guess its much better since you have less data than a 1.44 mb disk , but in greater surface area, so, much less dense and thus less fragile. (As long as I don't bend the poor thing or blow dust into it! )

So, I'll pick up a 1.2M drive and some disks. Any drive recommendations (or un-recommendations?) I see a bunch of these on ebay; just get any old one, grab a box of disks, and just see what happens?