Modern floppy disk question...

[Richard Schauer]

On Wed, 4 May 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:

> Anyone know why modern floppy disks are such total junk? They seem to
> often develop problems after only one or two writes - whereas back in
> the day they were always pretty reliable.

To add to the problem- why are modern floppy drives such junk?  I was
recently doing a 20-disk transfer between two computers, and after the
second pass I had one disk that developed some outrageous errors in a
particular band of tracks.  So I looked at it- the drive had scratched the
oxide off the media in a nice circle on one side around track 50.  Didn't
do it to any other disks in the stack.  This had happened to me before, on
other drives (all modern) with very little usage, and had never happened
to me using pre-1995-or-so hardware with tons more usage.

(All the drives I'm referring to are 3-1/2" of course)

Richard