I do to a small extent... So far, I have a few Jaz 2gb disks (but no working drives), LS-120 (no disk, only one drive that doesn't seem to be working 😠), DAT72 tapes (I had a matching drive but it died)...

I may have more to boot but that's about what I can recall at the moment.

Got two boxes of 3.5" and 5.25" floppies (about 20kg), basically NOS, though I wasn't collecting them specifically.

As above. Not collecting just get given old media and have a plastic bin full floppy disks of all types. Working external LS-120 attached to my 286 along with disks.

Ah yes I forgot: I also happen to have an Exabyte DATA8 tape drive, 5¼-inch full height monstrosity... I've been looking to find some tapes for it but so far nothing.

I just keep a few boxes of 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks as backup in case the ones I regularly use die.

A large box of new/sealed 5.25" floppies.. (25 boxes of 10) Work was throwing them away.. 🤣

Oh, and a small stash of Minidiscs for my Vaio MX.

I don't collect the media themselves, but I do pride myself in my collection of vintage hard disk drives. I've got just about everything except the very first Seagates.

Still looking for ST-506, ST-412, ST-212, and an ST-213.
Maybe an ST-277N if I can ever find one for an even close to reasonable price.

CMI 5000 series, anyone?

I wish! I have a hard time finding it around here.

People seem to recycle or re-sell old computers, occasionally, but shred or just trash the media.

I picked up any new-in-box old media I could find, when I was scouring the state for any classic computers and related tech. I just have a couple boxes of 5.25" 1.2 MB floppies, and a few boxes of 3.5" 1.44 MB diskettes. Oh, and all of three Zip disks. All of my old Ditto/Jaz tapes and drives are gone, along with my low-capacity floppies. I've got some new blank audio cassettes (various metal types), some new VHS, and one blank Betamax tape and 8 track tape.

Alas, things have gone turnways, so I don't hunt for anything anymore, but if necessary, I could transcode damn near any media format to any other.

wiretap wrote:

A large box of new/sealed 5.25" floppies.. (25 boxes of 10) Work was throwing them away.. 🤣

Nice. I have 15 boxes of 10. Sadly, all no-name. Pretty sure most won't work anymore, even though they are NOS.

derSammler wrote:

Nice. I have 15 boxes of 10. Sadly, all no-name. Pretty sure most won't work anymore, even though they are NOS.

This is what I'm most afraid of. I expect most of my new old stock media to be defect when putting them in use as their physical condition slowly deteriorates over time.

Yes! I've had a fascination with some of the odder storage media almost right from the start! 😁
When I started I knew about 5.25in and 3.5in floppy drives, but I basically only knew the DD (720kb) and HD (1.44mb) ones and that there was some weird formats around.

Then when I started tinkering with older hardware, I started to wonder what that 2.88mb floppy drive option was and it sparked my interest.

I also ran into quite a bit of older model ZIP drives and also started collecting this, though at the time it was actually my main way to transfer files across as using CD-Rs was very inconvenient to me and USB sticks were too expensive at the time.
I also found several 2.88mb floppy drives locally, but the vast majority was the IBM ones which were kinda incompatible with PCs. Finding the ED disks (2.88mb) locally was more of a challenge till I got lucky and bought some NOS ones.

I have basically every standard 5.25in and 3.5in floppy drives and disks and ZIP 100 and 250 drives (IDE, Parallel port and USB) and a single 750MB ZIP drive, some internal LS-120 drives (could never find the 240MB media or drives locally) and even a single floptical drive (SCSI, but I got none of its disks).
I also have some more obscure media, but none of the drives.

I didn't only collect them, I wanted to use and experience them and I've spend a LOT of time with reformatting programs, just to try things out 😁

The most versatile for me turned out to be the external 250MB ZIP drives.

I have a few LS-120 drives, but I'd like to get more. About 1/3 of the ones I've bought have arrived non-working, so they don't seem to be the most reliable thing out there. Unfortunately, actual internal LS-120 drives with the front bezel attached have been pricy whenever I looked, so I've been taking naked drives out of external enclosures instead. Aesthetically, I wish the front bezel was there but it's way cheaper that way.

I have I think 83 LS-120 disks. Most of them came from an eBay auction a couple years ago. I've only opened and used a few, all have been good disks so far.
I never had LS-120 when it was current, but I've come to like them and plan to keep using those drives/disks in retro machines. I find them handy when working with DOS systems without bothering with ethernet, and using them fits the mood. An actual 1.44MB floppy is just tedious in comparison, and too limited in what I can actually do with them.
For a while I even had an LS120 drive in a modern Core2 desktop that doesn't have a floppy connector (LS-120 uses the IDE connection).

I have a huge supply of CD-Rs, most of which I ordered in 2015 when JVC was about to shut down the Japanese Taiyo Yuden plant and sell the business to CMC Magnetics or whoever it was. I wanted to have good CD-Rs that work well in picky drives from the 1990s, especially video game consoles. But I've hardly touched them yet.

Disks are part of a drive but I don't collect them specifically. Floppys were unreliable back then and the past 20-30 years didn't help their reliability. I don't even buy software on floppys because a few of them always have errors.
The last thing I bought was a MS Word 5.0 pack on 5.25 and half of the disks were unreadable. It's like buying an irrepairable motherboard that just collects dust. Even unopened floppys go bad after a time and it's just as annoying as it was 30 years ago.

Although it doesn't help with 5.25", I've been impressed how well the second generation (so called 2X, due to their faster speed) LS-120 drives are at reading 3.5" disks. Their error handling is much better than first generation drives or conventional drives.

I tried imaging a couple 1.44MB game install floppies that I had not been able to read in 20 years in any conventional floppy drive. The 2nd gen LS-120 dumped both of them successfully.
One of them visibly had grooves ground into the disk that I could see under a light. It had to slow down when reading the worst part of that disk, but it succeeded. The other one just read straight through as if nothing was wrong at all.

Floppies were always failure prone, but density seems to make a huge difference. I had a lot more trouble with 3.5" 1.44MB floppies than 720KB. I started sometimes formatting HD floppies to 720KB when I only needed that much space, and wanted to minimize the chance of them failing, or maximize their compatibility between different machines. It worked.
To be honest, I don't think I trust removable USB or SD/etc Flash drives any more than I did floppies. They're just bigger and faster.