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single sided 3.5 floppy

I expect that any disk coated with mold or dirt will also have the wiper and interior of the shell also coated in mold and dirt. Poking a cleaning swab through the door might wipe off the disk but the disk will be recontaminated as soon as it touches the wiper again. I would crack open the shell, remove and clean the cookie, and then insert the cookie in a new shell with clean wiper. Copy the contents and discard the cookie along with the old shell.
 
The general agreement is that once a floppy has mold you can clean it to do a read but otherwise consider the disk no longer good as the mold eats away at the data surface and if you don't clean your drive after you risk contaminating other disks, much like moldy videotape.
 
Mold spores are everywhere, that's not an issue. They can only grow if there is very high air moisture and no air flow. So as long as the cleaned disks are stored properly, no new mold will grow. And, at least for me, if it does, I don't care much. I normally do the cleaning to get the data from the disk. Once I have the data, the physical disk is no longer important.
 
krebizfan said:
I expect that any disk coated with mold or dirt will also have the wiper and interior of the shell also coated in mold and dirt. Poking a cleaning swab through the door might wipe off the disk but the disk will be recontaminated as soon as it touches the wiper again. I would crack open the shell, remove and clean the cookie, and then insert the cookie in a new shell with clean wiper. Copy the contents and discard the cookie along with the old shell.
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That's certainly the case when I've done 5.25" and 8" floppies. I keep a stock of sacrificial ones for just that purpose.
 
The Tandy Portable Disk Drive for the Model 1 & 2 used a single sided 3.5" floppy formatted to 180K.
 
Agent Orange said:
The Tandy Portable Disk Drive for the Model 1 & 2 used a single sided 3.5" floppy formatted to 180K.
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that is correct! I should have recalled that ;). but, I always used double sided and assumed that was a TPDD issue (low cost, etc). But you are right on.
 
I think that the early Atari 520STs with the external disk drive was single-sided as well. One of the things that I did right off the bat was to fit 2 double-sided drives to mine.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I think that the early Atari 520STs with the external disk drive was single-sided as well. One of the things that I did right off the bat was to fit 2 double-sided drives to mine.
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Chuck I think there were two models. One was single sided. I purchased it a couple years back and started a thread on making a new 14 pin din cable and you let me know about its single sided nature. I have since found the double sided variant.
 
SF 354 drives for the Atari ST were the single sided drives. SF 314 were double sided. Shame you dont have your old documents for your heavily upgraded Atari ST Chuck.
 
VERAULT said:
SF 354 drives for the Atari ST were the single sided drives. SF 314 were double sided. Shame you dont have your old documents for your heavily upgraded Atari ST Chuck.
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Just saying that the floppy drive was first introduced with the ST was the SS variety. I was one of the early members of the official Atari Devlopers' group. I had a couple of large boxes (loose-leaf) of documentation. I posted availability here and donated them to a Chicago-area group, who doubtless accompanied them to the dumpster. My ST hard disk was an MFM drive driven by an OMTI RLL-to-SCSI adapter with my own board adapting SCSI to ACSI. Wrote my own drivers.

What turned me off of the Atari was the crappy keyboard.
 
VERAULT said:
Yes, Unfortunately I keep coming across floppies (3.5" and 5.25") with mold or dirt on the disk surface in my pickups.
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Well, that's what you get when you let the disks rattle around next to the mulch in the back of the truck. Keep those disks in a box in the cab! :ROFLMAO:
 
seaken said:
Well, that's what you get when you let the disks rattle around next to the mulch in the back of the truck. Keep those disks in a box in the cab! :ROFLMAO:
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I only wish, these are mostly from the disks I purchase from pick-ups. I have no idea where the folks who sold it to me stored it but I would bet good money attic, garage, or basement.
 
jafir said:
Some of the earliest 3.5” disks had a manual shutter. There was a spot you had to squeeze to make it close again.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1485834826842132481
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That's an auto-shutter disk, the manual shutter has no spring! The auto-shutter disks would work like modern 3.5" disks (where the user doesn't have to do anything with the shutter), but to maintain compatibility with the first drives by Sony they could latch open for the drives without the shutter-opening mechanism.

ms disk.jpg
 
Timo W. said:
So you never had disks with mold spots that you had to clean?

This is a very common issue. So common that you can find 3d-printable helpers for most disk formats (to keep the shutter open and a knob to rotate the disk).
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Indeed. I am waiting for that very item to arrive for 5.25. Manually applying an IPA-Swab and turning the disk iwith two fingers in the hub gets old after a few times. I saw a vid online where a guy opened up a 1541 and just held a soft brush or something similar as it was spinning - seemed a bit radical. I ran some tests and did not find that IPA up to 90%+ caused no issues (I suppose in a month those could turn to dust). Below ~60% and evaporation is too slow. Not sure what everyone else is using, but that is where I am at now.

Even in the same environment, one looks clean as a whistle and one next to it looks horrid. Thankfully, so far, *most* of mine are in decent shape.
 
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