generally the older a floppy is the better quality it will be and the longer it'll last (relative to it's time of course)

70's floppies tend to still work 40+ years later , while 3.5 floppies from 2005 tend to be about 20% DOA in the packaging.

In 2018 i'd say any floppy past 1988 is a 100% crap shoot if it works or not. It either died from old age despite being high quality , or from being low quality to begin with.

basically..... it's a tossup

emosun wrote:

generally the older a floppy is the better quality it will be and the longer it'll last (relative to it's time of course) […]
Show full quote

generally the older a floppy is the better quality it will be and the longer it'll last (relative to it's time of course)

70's floppies tend to still work 40+ years later , while 3.5 floppies from 2005 tend to be about 20% DOA in the packaging.

In 2018 i'd say any floppy past 1988 is a 100% crap shoot if it works or not. It either died from old age despite being high quality , or from being low quality to begin with.

basically..... it's a tossup

Thanks for the reply... Sadly, most of the stuff I wanted to preserve was late 80's to early 90's so that fits the bill perfectly.

In my own experience, 3.5'' High Density floppies are the worst when it comes to reliability, especially later ones. When buying new boxes of these in the late 90's and early 00's it was not surprising to find at least a couple that were DOA.

On the other hand, I've had surprisingly good luck with 5.25'' floppies. Pretty much all of my games that are in 5.25'' still work, and the few boxes of blank disks I still keep are in working condition.

pretty much all the floppies I pulled out don't work, sometiems they are lucky to display contents 1 or 2 will format but after a while they all have the seeking sector error

I have a couple floppies from the 90’s that just won’t give up, but most newer disks fail very quickly. I made a disk this morning from a box of new 3M disks - even formatted as 720K to reduce density - and it failed within a couple hours.

I havent had any commercially released games on floppy fail on me, yet, but some consumer-grade ones are now unusable.

For me pretty much all high density floppies I saved from early 90s still work. Although I did only save floppies that I thought were good brand like 3M and threw away any no-name floppies.

Just as an observation: I have frequently had issues when writing data to brand new 3.5" HD floppies in Windows 7 using an IBM USB floppy drive. Insert the same floppy into my 486, and it appears to work just fine. Honestly, I think USB floppy drives in general are a bit dodgy. They seem to be primadonnas when it comes to the quality of disks.

USB drives can be dodgy. And they lack a lot of technologies. Some can not read 720k and some can read 720k. And they are slower for some reason, when you want to format. Regarding the disks them self, then I have always had the best result with older 3M. Those from before Imation took over.

Hmm. I can't give a specific answer, but.. Our 5,25" and 3.5" floppies from the mid-80s and early 90s are still readable.
We stored them in diskette boxes in a cabinet originally (some from the cp/m era were continuously boxed-up in the attic since the move),
now these are on the loft/attic in solid card boxes, stuffed with news papers (partly rumpled).

Long-term equipment/media storage
Garages dangerous for retro hardware?

Edit: It's always woth a try to try to recover old disketttes by using a real floppy drive in case the USB floppy drives gives read errors.
Personally, I had a good experience with old NEC and Matsushita models so far. Not sure if these means a lot, though.

I have some floppies from the early 90s that still work perfectly fine.

The disks I have from back in my school days (late 80's early 90's) are still readable (created on Acorn Archimedes so reading them is a bit of a pain). 3.5" double density both of which are unbranded.

I also have a 5.25" from college which would be from the first half of the 90's which is still fully serviceable.

my Apple IIe floppies still work as of today.

The conditions of keeping may affect also. For example, if floppies are kept near windows or other sources of hard dust particles - them may become destroyed quicker, as that dust may scratch them during the use.
Also there is recommended regions of humidity and temperature.
To place a box with floppies in a hermetic plastic pocket should reduce the risks of environment.

In ideal conditions they seems were designed to store the data for 30 years. They loose magnetic info after a time, it's recommended to rewrite them every several years.

Good disk drive is important also. The same is with disk drives of any formats, - some of them read better.

I had just recently bought a used book about assembly programming from 1994 which came with a 720k floppy. Before I could even look if the disk was still readable I accidentally put the book on a magnetic mat that I use to hold screws and small parts. Assuming that this were the terminal blow to the data on the floppy I anxiously put the disk into my P133 with Windows 3.11 just to confirm my misery. But no, the disk was still completely readable without a single error! Even Winimage could read all sectors and made a beautiful IMA file of it.

On the other hand, a friend gave me two brand new packs with 20 TDK 3.5" HD floppies each. He used them until 2 or 3 years ago for his business (control software for industrial machines). About every third of them is DOA. Very disgusting...

I guess you were lucky that it was a permanent magnet. If the floppy was exposed to something pulsing (CRT, m. loop antenna etc), the effect may have been worse.

Most of my 90s consumer-grade floppies are fine and dandy. Although I barely use them.

I have an old Packard Bell (has Windows 95- I forget the specs) with a floppy drive that I've been slowly restoring. It was kept in a very dusty environment though so I don't know if I trust that drive. Although I suppose this is good motivation to finally finish getting that computer up to speed.

Perhaps I'll look for a new drive and see if it can read some of this stuff.

All my old floppies more or less still work. All my year 1999 floppies (the year I went to uni and found out Home of the Underdogs I bought a crapload of floppies to copy games on 😎 ) almost all died and the ones that didn't, are very slow to read - the floppy drive makes way more noise when reading them. They were Sony so not some cheap brand either.

Now, early CD-Rs ... those nearly all went to shit. Part of that was the permanent marker which seems to have bled into the plastic over time.