Modern floppy disk question...

Wed May 4 14:25:27 CDT 2005

On Wed, 4 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:

> Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> > That's a really good question.  I'd like an answer myself.  I routinely
> > read disks that are 20-25-30 years old with few problems, yet I can't walk
> > 10 feet to another computer and recover a file I just copied onto a modern
> > 3.5" disk without the disk going bad.  Go figure.
>
> Two words: Track density. Old 5.25" disks spread (in the case of IBM
> PC-land) 180KB per side of 5.25" surface area... later disks crammed
> four times as much in roughly half the surface area. I have had exactly
> one 5.25" disk go bad in storage in the last 25 years, but my 3.5" disks
> haven't been as lucky.

This being the case, it still doesn't explain, as Jules edified, why
contemporary 3.5" disks suck and older 3.5" media worked fine.

It also wouldn't explain why we have 300GB hard drives today that work
just as reliably if not more so than 10MB drives of 20 years ago.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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