keenmaster486 wrote:

How on earth do I find good floppy disks?

luck, thats about it.

keenmaster486 wrote:

How do I know which ones are good quality and which ones aren't?

you don't until you test them.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Is anyone making new ones?

I don't think so, AFAIK the last new ones were made in the early 2010s,

The production quality of floppy disks indeed went down significantly from the late 90s to the mid 2000s, I attribute that mostly by the fact that floppy disks were not relevant any longer for shipping of software and were largely replaced by CDs, thus allowing the remaining floppy manufacturers to save money on their products as reliability wasn't that important anymore.

The Quality of any old ones will to a significant degree also depend on how they were stored and it is impossible to tell their condition from a distance. Unfortunately you will likely have to gamble on the condition of any disks you can acquire and make do with whatever you can get.

An alternative (and arguably the only reasonable one) is to use a floppy emulator such as the gotek if you can't find any usable disks.

Yeah by the end of the 90's, floppies were really mostly used for cheaply transferring files - companies that didn't have email yet, used them for sending files from one location to another and students used them for quickly sharing smaller document and so on. Floppies were not really meant for long storage. I bought a ton of floppies in 1998, all Sony, when I started at uni and none of them still reliably work today. My very first Brother disks from 1993 all read fine and those got a TON of use since our first PC only had 14MB of free space and most of that was always taken up by games. I made a lot of drawings in BMP and three drawings were enough to fill a disk.

Personally, I'd go with a Gotek USB floppy emulator if you want reliability. If you want authenticity, I'm sure eBay will have some people selling off old lots of disks.

Hmm. Good information - but part of the whole reason I want to use floppies to begin with is because of the “coolness” factor of having this physical plastic spinning magnetic disk in the drive, so I’m unlikely to try the emulator. Maybe I’ll try to look on eBay for vintage disks.

There are a surprising number of NOS disks for sale, not too cheap but not too expensive either, if you don't need a ton.

I got a couple of boxes of 90s Bonus brand disks and all but one are good so far. I have an old box of Dysan 5.25's but I haven't opened it yet.

Ebay is not bad because shipping isn't mad and it's kind of worldwide. Some people find hauls at thrift stores but none of the stores around here have anything like that, unfortunately. Would be relaxing to test a floppy haul.

Get disks manufactured in the early 90s. You still have a very high chance of throwing the whole package away depending on how they were stored. But once you find a good package it'll last.

Any brand recommendations for that time period?

I have found that floppies tend to seem worse than they are, if you judge them by USB floppy drives.
Not saying that everybody does, but I have had my IBM USB floppy drive struggle with several floppies that have worked perefctly in my retro system. But that being said, floppies do seem to be quite poor quality in general these days.

LunarG wrote:

I have found that floppies tend to seem worse than they are, if you judge them by USB floppy drives.
Not saying that everybody does, but I have had my IBM USB floppy drive struggle with several floppies that have worked perefctly in my retro system. But that being said, floppies do seem to be quite poor quality in general these days.

USB floppy drives are utterly evil.

Back in 2008, we got a new HP Proliant server at work and it came with an HP USB floppy drive which wasn't needed so I was allowed to have it - since HP is generally good quality I assumed it would be good quality as well. I didn't use it much until recently when I wanted to make a boot disk of Windows 98. I tried 20 disks and each one would give an error! All these disks worked just fine on an actual old PC. I gave up and just hooked up an old PC to make the boot disk on. The USB drive ended up in the trash. I looked online to see if there were more reliable USB disk drives and it seems they all get terrible reviews for having poor reliability and even damaging disks.

One of the last resellers of floppy disks.
https://www.floppydisk.com/

There is a clip on youtube about this company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9tENHe19gk

They do in fact still produce floppy disks, at least in the US. Most likely since the US military still runs mostly off floppy disks. You can find brand new disks, as new as 2017, on ebay most of the time.

Edit: My TDK USB floppy drive has served me well over the past few years, It's a model FDD-100. I've had 0 problems with it as far as it not wanting to read disks. There is the occasional disk that winimage refuses to write to because of a bad sector, but if I try to reformat in my 286 machine it always shows a bad sector as well.

brostenen wrote:

One of the last resellers of floppy disks.
https://www.floppydisk.com/

Now this is very interesting. Looks like they have a pack of 50 "recycled" floppy disks for $19. Hmm... I wonder how many would be DOA.

Looks like their most expensive option per disk is the Imation 10-pack. Does this mean they're the best? Beats me. Or their "pro quality" 50 pack for $60 - whatever that means.

I'll think about this.

Those Verbatim ones on the site are ones i used to use a lot - they're pretty decent I found. Those Sony ones are the ones that all died so avoid those.

For me, TDK & Brother were the two best brands with TDK being slightly better but I preferred Brother because they had colour-coded disks (a pack of 10 had 2 of each colour) which made it a LOT easier to find the disk you needed. TDK were all black.