I have 9x 8" floppies
probably around 40x 5.25"
and more than 400 3.5"

They're all grabbing dust mostly, I use probably 25x 3.5" regularly out of the lot.

With disks with too many bad sectors, I once made geek clocks.

Around 50 5.25"
Around 300 3.5" - mostly DD for Amiga.

I use around 10 floppies - mostly OS boot disks.

I have 2x 5.25" Diskettes (Civilization I for IBM PC Compatibles) and around 20 or so 3.5" diskettes (9x 720KB diskettes and the rest are 1.44MB diskettes). I use the diskettes for either games (write protection enabled), backups of drivers for my 486, drivers for certain peripherals (PCMCIA kit, sound cards, CD-ROM drivers, external media, such as ZIP, LS-120, and data tapes), and/or boot/OS installation diskettes, such as MS-DOS 6.0 and 6.22 Upgrade, standard boot diskettes (including PloP boot loader to boot from a CD) for creating, repairing, or formatting fixed disks, installing Windows for systems that cannot boot from CD or no boot sector on the CDs, such as Windows 95, beta testing games that people are making today, or BIOS diskettes for my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus (there's a jumper that toggles between normal boot or fixed boot to repair the corrupted BIOS).

I have around 40 3.5" floppies which I use with my 486 pc mostly. The only 5 1/4" floppies I have are original games, so I am hoping to find some of them in near future.

Most floppy disks I gotten were free from people who were tossing them out and I got basically all ranges I think?
From 5.25in floppy disks (don't have any of those quad density disks I think?) to 3.5in (from SSDD to DSED) I have a couple hundred perhaps.
Since I have the space and these don't take up so much of it, I had no reason to throw any of them out. I haven't used them recently. I did use my USB ZIP drive on occasion, mostly to check what was on a couple ZIP disks I had rediscovered 🤣

Eh, 20 or so 3.5" ones, in a box somewhere. I backed up the data years ago. Most of them have likely expired by now.

SW-SSG wrote:

Eh, 20 or so 3.5" ones, in a box somewhere. I backed up the data years ago. Most of them have likely expired by now.

Why they would expire? I just recently re-formatted all my 3.5" floppies that all are 20-30 years old and none of them had any bad sectors.

Around 30 3.5" floppies: I keep around 10 with drivers, boot disks, and bios updates. The rest I use with an old Mavica I like to mess around with 😀

Around 100-120 3.5 floppies (20 of them in active use for Retro needs - drivers, boot disks, bios updates, masterbooter, pqmagic, ghost, etc.) and about 25-30 5.25s. Once I had about 400 3.5 and 100 5.25 disks, but already got rid of them years ago, just saving some (the current number) as spares.

In the past, I once used boxed 5.25 floppies as simple filling blocks under my retro closet to strengthen it 🤣

Up to recently not that many, until I visited an old collector who gave me a whole box full of 360K floppy disks.
I still have quite a collection of 1.44 MB & 1.2 MB floppy disks as well, that I have kept over the years. I don't have that many 720K floppy disks (probably around 20), which is mostly because they were quite expensive back in the day and we kept on using 360K floppies until these were surpassed by 1.44 MB floppies.

I don't actually use them that often unless, I wish to play around on my older hardware that doesn't have other means of transferring data (I like to keep it as original as possible).
Most of my floppy disks are now around 30 years old (if not older) and some of these do tend to go bad over time.

Ten 3.5" floppies. Threw all my old ones away and bought a box of quality ones for BIOS flashing etc, back when floppies slowly became obsolete.

Also got loads of 5.25" floppies for my C64. Haven't counted them, but it's hundreds of them.

Is there some way to make floppies reliable ? I remember buying them in 2000's and even in new condition some were unusuable (bad sectors or completely unreadable). I've always HATED floppy disks because I had so much corrupted files with them.

I have hundreds, spread between 8", 5.25" and 3.5" varieties. Some of them actually get some use- Even the 8" ones.
The reason they actually get use is due to the fact that I have many systems in my collection, and a good amount of them are not DOS/Windows machines. I prefer to use the media that the system would have used in its time vs. a floppy emulator or replacing drives with more modern alternatives.

8": I've never even seen one except in WarGames. 😀

5.25": I have only a few 5.25" IBM PC floppies. I've never used them because I've never owned an IBM 5.25" drive.
I remember my disappointment that I couldn't play the 5.25" Ultima Underworld demo. The 5.25" Ultima 7 came with that demo, but my 3.5" Ultima 7 either didn't come with it or the demo was still 5.25" (don't remember). Very silly of Origin to not publish that demo on a 3.5" for inclusion in their 3.5" Ultima 7 boxes.

I have around 50 or so Apple II 5.25" floppies. I recently got a 3.5" Apple II drive and ought to try transferring some things over to fresh disks, but I'm expecting roadblocks. I don't think my Apple IIc supports this type of drive natively. There's also the issue of copy protection on some of the games.

3.5": Hundreds of 3.5" IBM PC floppies, most of them are original game/etc disks. Maybe 100-200 retail "blanks" with random things on them, like game saves from 20+ years ago. Many are blank disks that I bought at Goodwill in recent years. I have little use for so many of these, especially now that I'm into LS-120.
I really need to go through all my game/etc floppies and make binary images of them.

ZIP: I have 2 Zip-100 disks, and one internal Zip-250 drive, but I've never tried these. I'm not invested into Zip stuff, and when I see the common external Zip drives for sale, I've been passing them by.

LS-120: I have 83 LS-120 disks and am fond of them. Most came from an NOS bulk lot. I've only been using 3 of them. I use them for transferring files with my socket 7 machine. The disks haven't failed yet, but I have had one drive fail on me and another that was DOA. So I'm worried the drives might be problematic. I need to look into how to clean them, maybe that will help.

okenido wrote:

Is there some way to make floppies reliable ? I remember buying them in 2000's and even in new condition some were unusuable (bad sectors or completely unreadable). I've always HATED floppy disks because I had so much corrupted files with them.

If they were problematic even when new, the drive might have been dirty. I don't know the procedure for disassembling and cleaning these drives, but it sounds like it could be needed.

If they are high density (1.44MB) floppies, I find that they are much more reliable if you format them as double density (720KB). To do that you need to cover the hole that identifies the disk type.
I've often read arguments that this isn't supposed to be a good idea because of some difference in the disks, but in actual practice I find that it works very well.
If you encounter a 1.44MB disk that is starting to produce errors, reformatting it as 720KB will typically bring it back to life as a reliable disk again. That alone proves the point, IMO.

Back when I used floppies more often, I got into the habit of preferring the 720KB format whenever it was sufficient for the task. I was especially prone to do this if I was going to use the disk in multiple drives. 1.44MB formatted disks would cause complaints from one drive or another, 720KB disks worked in everything.

I think the 1.44MB format was just too sensitive. It pushed the technology beyond it's reliable limits and was responsible for the terrible reputation that floppies have been left with.

Baoran wrote:

Why they would expire? I just recently re-formatted all my 3.5" floppies that all are 20-30 years old and none of them had any bad sectors.

All magnetic media will eventually de-magnetize, whether through wear or age. Some of the disks I was backing up already had corrupt files or were completely unreadable. (FWIW, every one of my disks is a 1.44MB 3.5" disk.)

Btw, I hope you were "full" formatting them instead of "quick" formatting; the latter won't necessarily find bad sectors before files do.

I have around 400 to 500 3,5 inch disks that are Amiga 880kb formatted. (mix of DD and HD)
Then I have just under 200 3,5 inch that are 1.44mb FAT formatted, that I use for Dos.
Finally some 40 to 50 5,25 inch disks that I use for Commodore64.

All of my disks have been reformatted, surface tested and rewritten from iso files this year.
Took some time, yet it is done.

shamino wrote:

I don't know the procedure for disassembling and cleaning these drives, but it sounds like it could be needed.

For 3,5 inch drives (720/880/1.44/1.76) and all 5,25 inch drives. The procedure is kind of easy.
Take off the top shield of the drive, and use cotton swaps drenched in Isopropyl alcohol.
You only need to rub the read/write heads gently with it... (rub the heads gently 🤣 )
The add some new grease to the "snail" that drives the read/write heads back and forth.

There is a ton of videos on youtube, regarding this.
Mostly Amiga/C64 related, though PC drives are mechanically identical inside.

shamino wrote:

If they are high density (1.44MB) floppies, I find that they are much more reliable if you format them as double density (720KB). To do that you need to cover the hole that identifies the disk type.
I've often read arguments that this isn't supposed to be a good idea because of some difference in the disks, but in actual practice I find that it works very well.
If you encounter a 1.44MB disk that is starting to produce errors, reformatting it as 720KB will typically bring it back to life as a reliable disk again. That alone proves the point, IMO.

That's really weird. Unlike 5.25" disks which squeezed twice as many tracks on the disk, 3.5" drives have the same number of tracks whether HD or DD, it's just that HD uses a stronger magnetic field to squeeze more data into each track. So when you're covering the density indicator hole, you're telling the drive to use a *weaker* magnetic field when writing to the disk. It'd probably work if the disk was new or has been demagnetised, but if it's already seen use as a 1.44MB floppy, formatting it at 720kB might cause corruption if the weaker magnetic field can't fully overwrite left-behind 1.44MB data.

I guess it seems more reliable because it's using twice as much space to write each "bit", so if some part of that is corrupted there might be enough extra to still get a reliable read. But everything I've read says that doing this only works in the short term and will cause the data to be lost over time much sooner than it otherwise would.

I have ~5 8" floppy disks. I do not know if thy work as I don't have anything to read them
~150-200 5"1/4 floppy disks in various conditions. Most are DD disks, few are sealed, other were recently unsealed, some are completely dead (I'll recycle them someday), some are in poor shape ... And some just work.
~200-400 3,5" floppy disks. Many are brand new, most are HD disks, but some other disk are in poor shape as well and all won't be recoverable ...

At least that taught me how to recover data from dying disks (where you only get one chance or two to backup data)