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New old stock floppies loosing data...

KC9UDX said:
Same here. I wonder if he's experiencing this.
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Well, I can not switch off a Displaywriter by components, so on power down everything goes off, including the drive. I can remove the floppies from it before switching off though, but the fact that the ones in the box go bad as well, it must be something else.

By the way, could there be difference in 8 inch floppy availability in US and Europe? I do not get lot of results in European Ebay for example, especially if I want to buy DS/DD instead of SSSD or SSDD floppies. The price factor as well - NOS noname 10 floppies of unknown capacity would cost about 30 USD, with shipping, but DS/DD about 40... That is - I'm not talking about sellers who want about 100 USD for a box of Basf DS/DD floppies.
 
If SS floppies are cheaper and more available, you can punch the appropriate index aperture in one to convert it to DS. Or vice versa.

Most of my new stock is Imation.

Radio Shack-branded DS 8" floppies can be really evil; but not all of them.
 
Adventurer said:
Well, I can not switch off a Displaywriter by components, so on power down everything goes off, including the drive. I can remove the floppies from it before switching off though, but the fact that the ones in the box go bad as well, it must be something else.

By the way, could there be difference in 8 inch floppy availability in US and Europe? I do not get lot of results in European Ebay for example, especially if I want to buy DS/DD instead of SSSD or SSDD floppies. The price factor as well - NOS noname 10 floppies of unknown capacity would cost about 30 USD, with shipping, but DS/DD about 40... That is - I'm not talking about sellers who want about 100 USD for a box of Basf DS/DD floppies.
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I'm not sure how you determine that they go bad in the box versus go bad when you put them in the box.

My concern with power-down is that since you turn the whole works off at once, if internal the drive and computer have different power supply characteristics (almost impossible that they don't) one will always lose power before the other. Which one we don't know without careful observation, electrically. So it's plausible that the drives have power long enough after signals from the computer(controller) fall to damage a disk.
 
KC9UDX said:
I'm not sure how you determine that they go bad in the box versus go bad when you put them in the box.
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Well, I make copies, test, remove, put in box (without switching off the machine). At least I can exclude the factor of them going bad when powering down the machine.
 
What if you leave it in the drive and read/compare, read/compare, read/compare. How many times can you do that before failure versus how many times you put it in the box? Or, how much time passes in the drive versus how much time in the box? It probably sounds like I'm just trying to give you a hard time, but I'm trying to gather data.

I'd really like to know if something inside your drive or something outside your drive is damaging the data on the disks versus the data on the disks deteriorating on its own. Only because I've yet to ever experience data deteriorating on its own. Maybe I've just been lucky, but in 40 years all the disks I've written are readable except the ones that had obvious mechanical defiiciencies or damage.

My guess (and because I have no experience with data loss over time, I could be wrong) is that if the data is deteriorating on its own, that it would take longer than what you are experiening.
 
KC9UDX said:
What if you leave it in the drive and read/compare, read/compare, read/compare. How many times can you do that before failure versus how many times you put it in the box? Or, how much time passes in the drive versus how much time in the box? It probably sounds like I'm just trying to give you a hard time, but I'm trying to gather data.

I'd really like to know if something inside your drive or something outside your drive is damaging the data on the disks versus the data on the disks deteriorating on its own. Only because I've yet to ever experience data deteriorating on its own. Maybe I've just been lucky, but in 40 years all the disks I've written are readable except the ones that had obvious mechanical defiiciencies or damage.

My guess (and because I have no experience with data loss over time, I could be wrong) is that if the data is deteriorating on its own, that it would take longer than what you are experiening.
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Already doing this, and the results are here:

Yesterday wrote 4 system floppies:

Red (Maxell)
Green (Maxell)
Yellow (Maxell)
Red - Verbatim (the only floppy from another manufacturer I have)

All floppies yesterday were able to boot from the same machine from any of the drive slots. While machine was on, I removed all floppies. Switched off the machine, inserted green floppy after, left overnight. In the morning:

Switching on the machine - green floppy (Maxell) no longer boots
Take Verbatim - boots without a hiccup, removed
Take yellow floppy (Maxell), boots fine first time, green floppy is not recognised at all - system even does not show the label
Reboot - boots fine, but no longer wants to launch text editing
Reboot - crashes in the middle of booting
Take Verbatim - boots without a hiccup, removed
Take red floppy (Maxell) - boots fine first time, text editing works

I did not remove the floppies when rebooting the machine today, but I will remove last one working Maxell to see how long will it be able to store its data this way. I still suspect it will go bad even with removing it from the machine after a few retries.

With Verbatim working flawlessly (even having some hard to read sectors), it makes me think this particular brand/batch has gone bad - improper storage conditions, such as temperature fluctuations or something like that.

Anyway, for now this brand is one to avoid, at least for me:

P1001427[1].jpg

Here you can see the plastic breaking off from the edge - all Maxells I have are very fragile. I can not make an index hole for SD, because then it would crack in long diagonal lines as soon as it is bent even a little. Still, fragile plastic does itself should not have any impact on retaining the data...

P1001428[1].jpg
 
To me, from this distance, something is clearly happening when you reboot. It seems to be affecting the Verbatim disk less than the Maxell ones. But unless the Maxell disk intuitively knows when you reboot (impossible), this must be the case.

I expect that if you kept the Verbatim disk in and rebooted numerous times, that you'd eventually have the same results.
 
Adventurer said:
With Verbatim working flawlessly (even having some hard to read sectors), it makes me think this particular brand/batch has gone bad - improper storage conditions, such as temperature fluctuations or something like that.
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While brand, batch and environmental conditions can be a factor they are not the only factors.

I have handled and stored thousands upon thousands of floppies and there are definitely other failures that are not related to either brand, batch or environment.

I have many groups of disks where not even one of them has gone bad.

I have found 1 disk in a group that was bad.

I have found 2 or 3 bad disks in a similar group.

I have found multiple bad disks in another group.

And I have seen where all the disks in a group were no longer useable.

All disks were stored similarly.

Floppies just go bad.

While it's not always going to be possible to determine why some of these disks have failed it's really quite simple to realize that they have become unuseable.
 
I have hundreds upon hundreds of disks all stored the same way. Hundreds of them have "gone bad", but I have yet to find one that I couldn't understand. Most of them have cookies that won't spin freely. Others have shed media. Some have mechanical damage.

There is one exception: 3.5" disks. I have a plethora of bad ones for which I can only wonder why they worked in the first place. They don't seem to have enough magnetic permeability. I could be misdiagnosing them, but that's because I never really tried. Unlike all my 5.25" and 8" disks, they have just failed by the hundred and I don't usually bother to do anything but bin them.

I can hardly believe that a disk will keep its contents for 12 hours and then completely go belly up in minutes, due to bad media.
 
My experience is pretty much the same. I've given up on the 3.5" floppies. I keep, and have kept, everything in the same room all these years - CCT tapes, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies (DD and 1.2MB), 3.5" floppies (more HD than 720KB), and only the 3.5" floppies give me major problems. It's rare to find an issue with the other media, and if there is one, there's usually a good explanation.
 
Tor said:
I've given up on the 3.5" floppies. I keep, and have kept, everything in the same room all these years - CCT tapes, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies (DD and 1.2MB), 3.5" floppies (more HD than 720KB), and only the 3.5" floppies give me major problems.
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Would you like to see a picture of my stack of 5¼" floppies that have failed? It's roughly a foot and a half (45cm) high! :)
 
I've had hit and miss with 5.25" floppies as well.
Cg8lmpMWMAAhv26.jpg
A photo from the last box box of 100 sealed NOS floppies I paid for (and shipping to NZ)

For disks that didn't have that (from other orders) I've had some that were unreliable, and others that still boot a machine years later.
 
Stone said:
Would you like to see a picture of my stack of 5¼" floppies that have failed? It's roughly a foot and a half (45cm) high! :)
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That's not that many. I bet I could had filled two bankers boxes with them in the last 5 years. But every one that I'm aware of had an obvious mechanical fault. I even documented it somewhere here (or rather the old board). I was having a very high success rate taking the cookie out and reading it separately. Of the ones that didn't have creased or shedding cookies, the reason was nearly always (or maybe always) that the cookie bearing material was breaking down and not altering the cookie to spin freely.

I was even able to make them work very temporarily by lubricating them with IPA. I even did that successfully very recently.
 
I don't know what i've done to 3.5" floppies but mine drop like flies, Always throwing the buggers in the bin, 5.25" floppies are a different matter, I can't remember the last time i had a 5.25" go bad, I've got loads from many years ago and still good.
 
Most of the failures I've encountered (both 5¼" and 3½") were a result of oxide shedding and fouling the heads which then required running the cleaning disk.
 
Stone said:
Most of the failures I've encountered (both 5¼" and 3½") were a result of oxide shedding and fouling the heads which then required running the cleaning disk.
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Well, the cleaning disk istelf is a problem for 8 inch drives - I can not get it anywhere for a reasonable price (100 USD with shipping does not counts), have to use manual cleaning...
 
Adventurer said:
Well, the cleaning disk istelf is a problem for 8 inch drives - I can not get it anywhere for a reasonable price (100 USD with shipping does not counts), have to use manual cleaning...
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I've always wondered how hard it could be to make one. It's just a matter of having a suitable material to cut a cleaning cookie out of, and a scrap disk to insert it in. It would even be beneficial to not seal the disk back up.

But I have no idea what would be the right material.
 
KC9UDX said:
That's not that many. I bet I could had filled two bankers boxes with them in the last 5 years. But every one that I'm aware of had an obvious mechanical fault. I even documented it somewhere here (or rather the old board). I was having a very high success rate taking the cookie out and reading it separately. Of the ones that didn't have creased or shedding cookies, the reason was nearly always (or maybe always) that the cookie bearing material was breaking down and not altering the cookie to spin freely.

I was even able to make them work very temporarily by lubricating them with IPA. I even did that successfully very recently.
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I use cyclomethicone for that. Seems to work every time.

The cleaning disk material appears to be nothing more or less than non-woven interfacing fabric, without the adhesive backing. Buy it by the yard.
 
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