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Where can I get some good inexpensive 3.5" Floppy disks?

I used to order bulk floppies from a company found in computer shopper in the 90's, they worked well at thew time. The last batch of floppy disks I purchased were Imation 10 packs purchased in bulk from ebay and I used most of them I think.

If you store the disks in a very cold and very hot garage they will probably go bad over time even if unopened.
 
The problem is that quality control on 3.5” HD floppy media seems to have been abysmal, when compared to their predecessors. Given that, and the additional data density, problems were bound to occur.

Whenever possible, I have discontinued using 3.5” HD floppy drives and replaced them with Gotek/FlashFloppy units.

- Alex
 
The bulk disks from the 70s had very poor quality. There weren't many extra disks that passed QC after OEM orders were fulfilled so a lot of marginal disks were sold to users willing to test and discard. I think the peak of quality was during the latter part of the 80s when all the production bugs had been worked out but before the relentless drive to cut costs and the much shorter expected use life of a floppy kicked in. After 2000, most floppy disks got used once to install BIOS updates. Those disks did not require the same durability as with CP/M systems running off a single set of disks for months.
 
I've had luck with old and even sealed NOS that acted bad to take a strong neodymium magnet across the jacket of the disk then reformat. Yeah you get an occasional one that just refuses to format (maybe physical defects esp on 5.25's) but it works ok in general, better than tossing them without at least trying. I got a lot of older Mac floppies and been able to delete the old info enough that it would format on a 720k or 1.44 dependant on the type of floppy it was.
 
Unknown_K said:
I used to order bulk floppies from a company found in computer shopper in the 90's, they worked well at thew time. The last batch of floppy disks I purchased were Imation 10 packs purchased in bulk from ebay and I used most of them I think.
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We used to do the same as a group to get a better price for bulk quantities. IIRC it was MEI Micro before they opened numerous stores under the Microcenter name
 
eBay is hit or miss. I bought a package of disks and half were bad. You never know what conditions the disks were stored in.
 
VERAULT said:
eBay is hit or miss. I bought a package of disks and half were bad. You never know what conditions the disks were stored in.
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Unfortunately that is the downside of ebay, so true. But when it's a "hit", it sure feels good ;-) and likewise the "miss" is quite frustrating!
 
Macshrike said:
Is nobody reading my posts? You can just buy em new on the interweb-thingy.
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Nobody is manufacturing floppies anymore, so even though they are "new" they are old stock. No different than buying new old stock (NOS) from ebay. $2/disk is also pricey.
 
I will agree that floppydisk.com is legit. I have bought from there several times.

They have an offer for 50 new-old-stock Imation 3.5" HD floppies for $60, which isn't all that bad, IMO.

- Alex
 
Every once in awhile, I clean out my old archives, reformat-with-verify and offer the floppies FFS. Usually, I don't post until I've got about 50 or so. Lots of 720K ones, usually. I toss any that report bad sectors after reformatting. I don't re-use the things myself as I have plenty of new 720Ks left over.
 
I still have a decent stock of new 5.25" DD and 3.5" DD/HD disks around and have not been using them up like I used to. prices have been going up over the years for NOS disks as they are not as common and newer people with no stock are getting into the hobby.

Used disks are a gamble because you have no idea how they were stored, especially 5.25" that have exposed media and can get moldy.
 
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