Floppy media recommendations (was: the floppy thread)

[Chuck(G)]

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?

You want reliable? Try 8". I handle 30+ year old data all the time on them. Very rarely any problems.

 

[Lutiana]

My XT actually has a 1.44mb disk in it. That made getting data to it so much easier. And since I do the image archive thing I don't ever care if the disk does not last or is unreliable. As soon as I see a bad sector on it that won't go away after 1 or 2 formats, I simply toss it and grab another one. This results is a lot less frustration and no loud cursing at inanimate objects.

 

[k2x4b524[]

the 1.44, u use a 16bit controller in an 8bit slot with 2M?

also, howd you figure out that the toshiba 360k has a different track width than the alps 360k?

 

[Lutiana]

the 1.44, u use a 16bit controller in an 8bit slot with 2M?

No, I have an 8 bit floppy controller that has its own BIOS. I did try the 16bit IO card with 2m, and it worked very well but I did not want to give up the memory to run this, plus I all ready had the 8bit floppy card.

 

[sombunall]

also, howd you figure out that the toshiba 360k has a different track width than the alps 360k?

Maybe I'm wrong but I drew a conclusion. The Newer Toshiba can read any disk written by a 1.2M, the alps can't. It also seems that anything I write with the Alps will work in the other drives, but the Toshiba written disks can't always seem to be read in the Alps.