There is no guarantee that new old stock floppy discs will still be good. It's always handy to have a few boxes, most of which should be OK.

I think same.

Buying floppies from known-good sources or good brands is a possibility.
And here, Verbatim isn't too unknown for the matter. 😀

That being said, using a good floppy drive is also important.

Maybe a 5 volt type from the 286/386/486 days.

The 3.3v types from the late 90s/Pentium days may use 3.3 volt from data cable and are generally of lower quality.

Their gears and motors are weaker, more flimsy, the chassis is lightweight aluminium . Built quality as such is worse than from the good old IBM days.

Long story short, use a heavy, bulky old 3,5" floppy drive, rather than a slime-line model.

Especially USB drives come to mind here.
The old, bulky models from the iMac G3 days are usually okay.

They won't harm floppies so likely and won't cause a track 0 damage, thus.

Those lightweight black/silver models are hit and miss.
They may work with good floppy disks, but not the cheap ones.

Quality flopy drives are much more forgiving, generally speaking.

I've bought many brands of new, sealed floppies. The best is Sony. They always 100% work. Maxell, Verbatim, Nashua, etc always have a few with bad sectors in the box.

My experience is that the brand doesn't really matter that much (I suspect they all came from same one or two factories anyways) but disks produced after 1995 seem to be of ever going downhill quality opposed the ones before 1995. I'd avoid disks produced from 2000 onwards. I'd had whole boxes of that time period were not a single disk worked. Late 80's, early 90's timeframe seem to be the best quality when it came to floppy disks (IMHO).

More important would be where have these been stored for the last 10+ years. Thats whats going to affect lifespan
If someone's clearing out their garage that's damp in winter and boiling hot in summer, then you're going to get more dead disks then used disks that have come out an air-conditioned server room.
It's very useful to have a few disks, sometimes they are needed for boot disks, low level driver installs, etc.

Buying any disk is a gamble now. I'm not sure what the currant price per disk is at, I always grab disks I come across but getting a Gotek even with standard firmware is a better long term investment.

pan069 wrote on 2024-05-16, 22:03:

My experience is that the brand doesn't really matter that much (I suspect they all came from same one or two factories anyways) but disks produced after 1995 seem to be of ever going downhill quality opposed the ones before 1995. I'd avoid disks produced from 2000 onwards. I'd had whole boxes of that time period were not a single disk worked. Late 80's, early 90's timeframe seem to be the best quality when it came to floppy disks (IMHO).

You're spouting a common misconception. Just because they all came from the same factory does not mean they are the same quality. Product binning means products from the same factory can span different levels of quality., based on specs and price different customers are willing to pay.

kingcake wrote on 2024-05-16, 23:46:

pan069 wrote on 2024-05-16, 22:03:

My experience is that the brand doesn't really matter that much (I suspect they all came from same one or two factories anyways) but disks produced after 1995 seem to be of ever going downhill quality opposed the ones before 1995. I'd avoid disks produced from 2000 onwards. I'd had whole boxes of that time period were not a single disk worked. Late 80's, early 90's timeframe seem to be the best quality when it came to floppy disks (IMHO).

You're spouting a common misconception. Just because they all came from the same factory does not mean they are the same quality. Product binning means products from the same factory can span different levels of quality., based on specs and price different customers are willing to pay.

Okay, that kinda makes sense. Like the quality difference of cpus on the waver.

pan069 wrote on 2024-05-16, 22:03:

My experience is that the brand doesn't really matter that much (I suspect they all came from same one or two factories anyways) but disks produced after 1995 seem to be of ever going downhill quality opposed the ones before 1995. I'd avoid disks produced from 2000 onwards. I'd had whole boxes of that time period were not a single disk worked. Late 80's, early 90's timeframe seem to be the best quality when it came to floppy disks (IMHO).

I think that even when new, floppy disks from the early 2000 were a gamble. I remember going through a box of 20 while I was in college in 2001 just to get through the first year of my IT classes even had late homework because of failed disks. If you're going to use floppy disks limit use to boot disks, bios updates, and booters.

psaez wrote on 2024-05-16, 16:08:

Hi […]
Show full quote

Hi

I found the possibility to purchase 20 virgin floppy disks 1.44mb from verbatim for 10 euro the full pack, in two sealed boxes of 10 units each.

Is a good idea to purchase them? Whould I need them for something if I wanna have a retro system to play games on MSDOS, W95, 3.11, 98SE etc...?

Which is the lifespan of a virgin floppy disk? Maybe they are dead already even with the box sealed?

Thank you.

Man .. have I put in a lot of time testing/researching floppy disks over the years 😀

Look for my ImageDisk program (on "Daves Old Computers") - it can save/restore "most anything soft sector",
and has some decent disk/drive test/alignment tools!

That being said - I've not uses these, but I've seen a few "floppy disk emulators" which look like an actual floppy drive
to the system, but have a non-floppy way "SD card" etc. of storing the data.

That might give a "functional" floppy dive that's more reliable than flexible magnetic media.
Be aware hovever that if the software does "non-standard" things - usually by direct-access to the FDC
(as some games do for copy protection) - it may not work...

PS: And 1.44 HD diskettes are EASY to find! - I've just been packing up/transporting my Altair with NorthStar floppy
disk system (from the 70s - 5.25" hard-10 sectored media)... Good luck finding those there days!
(and my original diskettes from the late 70s still work!)

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Another option you might try is an LS-120 drive. (Assuming your motherboard supports them) They're backward-compatible with 1.44mb floppies and read/write faster than a traditional drive.

They also connect via IDE, freeing up your floppy cable for a potential 5.25" drive and you can still use a Gotek or other emulator to conserve physical media.

Using an USB to 1.44MB Floppy emulator maybe a good idea.

1995 was when 3M spun off their media division into Imation. Anyway, there were good and bad brands of disks before that date probably because disks had become commodities and production was moved offshore to low tech Asian countries with bad QC.

385387386 wrote on 2024-05-17, 02:14:

Using an USB to 1.44MB Floppy emulator maybe a good idea.

DaveDDS wrote on 2024-05-17, 01:42:

That being said - I've not uses these, but I've seen a few "floppy disk emulators" which look like an actual floppy drive
to the system, but have a non-floppy way "SD card" etc. of storing the data.

well, finally I purchased the floppy disks, and will take a look at your software, thank you.

But I'm considering purchasing also a floppy usb emulator. Please, can you guys tell me if this floppy disk emulator is the one you were talking about? is it compatible with any motherboard? do require drivers if you use it on msdos, w3.11, w95 etc...? In the description they say in the product: "for YAMAHA KORG ROLAND Electronic Keyboard". Does that mean that it will not work on any retro computer?

https://es.aliexpress.com/item/32955231735.html
https://es.aliexpress.com/item/32993988950.html

The Gotek was invented for electronic instruments and, on stock firmware, only supports a couple of formats - but (on most variants) you can install third party ones like HxC (paid) or FlashFloppy to make it perform more flexibly 😀

No drivers required, well, as many drivers as a real FDD would (maybe you need drivparm or the like to force HD capacity or use it as 3rd/4th drive 😁 )

Most PCs (and other things with floppies), yes, the basics (drive select, motor enable, seek, read/write) are largely universal, and other control signals (density, speed, busy, disk change) are mostly configurable, though you'd want to read the documentation of the firmware you want to use to see what it can do on your specific Gotek (like "EasyCap" there are many lookalikes of rather different composition and quality!)

As for real floppies… I trust disks more than drives, after finding out the truth over 10 years after throwing out maybe 12 disks that wouldn't format in the only one I had at the time……

Ryccardo wrote on 2024-05-17, 19:26:

The Gotek was invented for electronic instruments and, on stock firmware, only supports a couple of formats - but (on most varia […]
Show full quote

The Gotek was invented for electronic instruments and, on stock firmware, only supports a couple of formats - but (on most variants) you can install third party ones like HxC (paid) or FlashFloppy to make it perform more flexibly 😀

No drivers required, well, as many drivers as a real FDD would (maybe you need drivparm or the like to force HD capacity or use it as 3rd/4th drive 😁 )

Most PCs (and other things with floppies), yes, the basics (drive select, motor enable, seek, read/write) are largely universal, and other control signals (density, speed, busy, disk change) are mostly configurable, though you'd want to read the documentation of the firmware you want to use to see what it can do on your specific Gotek (like "EasyCap" there are many lookalikes of rather different composition and quality!)

As for real floppies… I trust disks more than drives, after finding out the truth over 10 years after throwing out maybe 12 disks that wouldn't format in the only one I had at the time……

what do you mean? I can't understand if is it necessary or not a firmware or drivers. Check these two:

https://es.aliexpress.com/item/32955231735.html
https://es.aliexpress.com/item/32993988950.html

please, simply tell me if they will work plug and paly with any motherboard and MSDOS, windows 3.11, windows 95 etc...

or will I need to install a different firmware into the emulator or even a driver?

Hard to answer based on the very little information provided by the sellers,
both will probably work as a standard 1440 kB floppy drive on the official (100/1000 hardcoded images) firmware but nothing more can be really said...

And the second one (UDD) is a less flexible (and harder to reflash) clone 😀

Gotek Floppy Emulator with FlashFloppy

Flashing the Gotek floppy emulator with HxC firmware

Gotek fails floppy drive test

Gotek woes (32KB) - anyone else?

^These threads come to mind..

Generally speaking, the original Gotek firmware is *ss poor (IMHO). 😢

It requires a special partitioning&formatting utility for the USB pen drive.
Which can send some USB pen drives straight into heaven.

In addition, the original Gotek firmware is being locked into one specific floppy format, depending on the model number. 1,44 MB or 720KB.

That's why they're called SFRM72-TU100K or SFR1M44-U100, for example.
The manufacturer wants the customer to buy a specific model for each use case.

By contrast, using HxC or Flash Floppy makes the hardware more versatile and adds support for various image formats.

Which is good, because some boot disks or installation disks come in 360K, 720K, 1200K or 1440K format.

But that's just my personal experience.
I can't guarantee for anything, of course. 🙁
(All information is supplied without guarantee.)

PS: There are Goteks which are sold pre-flashed with Flash Floppy (HxC isn't free).
For Amiga platform, mainly, I think.

Just be careful that the Gotek isn't a COVID model with 32KB of RAM (released during pandemic):
I had lots of trouble with an AT32F415 chip model.

It was originally flashed with a special Flash Floppy version, which I had soon replaced because of issues.:
Just to learn that all other versions are incompatible (wrong timings),
except the version I had replaced in the beginning.

Speaking of floppies, I just saw Adrian’s latest video on the PicoMEM and learned and one if its many features is floppy emulation and it looks really great. Pretty handy if you have ISA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hVe8E5TiWc