Here is a recent thread What are the better 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drives around?

Bondi wrote on 2022-02-08, 11:41:

Here is a recent thread What are the better 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drives around?

I'm asking about disks specifically.

Dysan, 3M, Memorex, Verbatim. That's what I remember from the old days. How I wish the younger me didn't throw away all of those floppies once they started having bad sectors, I now know so much more about the tech to probably rescue some of them. But then again I did use them a lot with various drives, they weren't tossed simply because of "old". I did actually keep some 3Ms that didn't see much use.

500 brand name 5.25" floppies in good (or even decent) quality is going to be expensive. NOS boxes in plastic wraps are going to be very expensive. Probably as expensive as they were back in the days (~40 USD for a box of 10). I wish you luck, you are going to need it.

Deunan wrote on 2022-02-08, 11:55:

Dysan, 3M, Memorex, Verbatim. That's what I remember from the old days. How I wish the younger me didn't throw away all of those floppies once they started having bad sectors, I now know so much more about the tech to probably rescue some of them. But then again I did use them a lot with various drives, they weren't tossed simply because of "old". I did actually keep some 3Ms that didn't see much use.

500 brand name 5.25" floppies in good (or even decent) quality is going to be expensive. NOS boxes in plastic wraps are going to be very expensive. Probably as expensive as they were back in the days (~40 USD for a box of 10). I wish you luck, you are going to need it.

Thanks! I have been gathering Verbatim HD disks, so that's good to hear.

Yeah, it's not going to be cheap, but there are NOS bulk HD 5.25 disks that are less than a dollar apiece, some are around .25 apiece depending on how many you buy. The issue is if these all have bad sectors or they break down quickly, or were at any time stored improperly, that price-per-disk goes up as others fail. So I need to find a middle ground between buying random noname disks and shelling out for sealed packs of 10 of one brand until I have enough.

Yes, storage conditions are important. It doesn't have to be perfectly 20C with controlled humidity (though it would be great) but if the temperature swinged close to 0C (or worse, below), and/or above 35C, the magnetic material can easily start to flake off. Nothing can be done about that. That obviously also goes for any material warpage but that won't happen even in 40C, you'd need to leave the floppies in the sun for that to happen.

Then there is the mold because of too high humidity - that can sometimes be removed with IPA or ethanol, but usually not really completly. The disc will work, for a time anyway, so it can be used or at least have copies made, but I would not count on it long-term.

Lastly any used floppies will just slowly loose the friction-lowering additives and at that point head will start scraping the magnetic material off. This can kill the drive too if the head becomes so clogged as to "catch" on the disk surface and get ripped off. So any weird loud noises should always be investigated, and the heads inspected often would not hurt either.

dumpsterac1d wrote on 2022-02-08, 11:38:

The issue I'm running into is I need a decent stock of floppies (around 500) for a project

what project (on earth) needs five hundred floppies???
more background please 😀

can't you use a hardware floppy emulator for your project?
the SD cards can easily hold the content of 500 floppies

like:
https://www.drem.info/
http://www.gotekemulator.com/
https://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_drive_emulator/
and many more

Deunan wrote on 2022-02-08, 12:12:

Yes, storage conditions are important. It doesn't have to be perfectly 20C with controlled humidity (though it would be great) but if the temperature swinged close to 0C (or worse, below), and/or above 35C, the magnetic material can easily start to flake off. Nothing can be done about that. That obviously also goes for any material warpage but that won't happen even in 40C, you'd need to leave the floppies in the sun for that to happen.

Then there is the mold because of too high humidity - that can sometimes be removed with IPA or ethanol, but usually not really completly. The disc will work, for a time anyway, so it can be used or at least have copies made, but I would not count on it long-term.

Lastly any used floppies will just slowly loose the friction-lowering additives and at that point head will start scraping the magnetic material off. This can kill the drive too if the head becomes so clogged as to "catch" on the disk surface and get ripped off. So any weird loud noises should always be investigated, and the heads inspected often would not hurt either.

All very good things to keep in mind.

I guess the next step is to query the sellers to see if they know the history of their product (if it's been stored well) and if they can identify the fabricator.

Just to re-ask, are the "newer" 5.25 disks like the 2000s era disks, in that a lot of them are junk? Or is 5.25 stock generally good from any era of production

llm wrote on 2022-02-08, 12:50:

what project (on earth) needs five hundred floppies??? more background please :) […]
Show full quote

dumpsterac1d wrote on 2022-02-08, 11:38:

The issue I'm running into is I need a decent stock of floppies (around 500) for a project

what project (on earth) needs five hundred floppies???
more background please 😀

can't you use a hardware floppy emulator for your project?
the SD cards can easily hold the content of 500 floppies

like:
https://www.drem.info/
http://www.gotekemulator.com/
https://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_drive_emulator/
and many more

I am starting a shareware "digital magazine". Some curated shareware releases with installers and menus, articles, interviews with developers when I can get them, etc. On 5.25 HD floppies and 1.44 3.5 floppies in editions of 50 each for standard editions and 10 each for limited editions with color floppies. I have the first 5 or so issues planned and am just working on logistics, boxes, programming for the menus, and buying stock.

Labor of love, which means $$$ out of pocket, but hopefully anyone who misses getting shareware disks in the mail will appreciate.

These floppies better be well packed when mailed 😀 Regarding age, newer 5.25 floppies might be of somewhat worse quality, yes. I remember having issues with seemingly good brand ones - BASF (so I didn't mention them) but it could've been fakes or poorly stored or shipped. That being said I'd argue the HD ones always felt a bit subpar compared to earlier DD floppies - no friction ring in the center, thinner envelope (or at least it felt like it's more bendy material), sleeves not glued together as well, cheap boxes. Well, Dysan made sturdy, plastic boxes for their 100 line, I miss those. Even the cardboard 2-piece ones (from 3M for example) were nice. Then came the usual thin paper boxes and +1/+2/+3 floppies offers - not saying those are definitely worse but, trying to fight the onslaught of 3.5" floppies, corners were surely cut somewhere.

At this point though there is nothing you can do but trust the seller, who might not know any better. Frankly I've had some good experiences lately with used floppies I got cheap, so don't worry too much. Better make sure you have clean, well-calibrated drive before blaming the media. And don't throw away good (especially plastic) boxes, I mean I would not want to pay for shipping to EU but I bet people on the other side of the pond would jump on those as well.

dumpsterac1d wrote on 2022-02-08, 12:52:

Just to re-ask, are the "newer" 5.25 disks like the 2000s era disks, in that a lot of them are junk? Or is 5.25 stock generally good from any era of production

From personal observation which doesn't prove anything, disks produced closer to the end of their era are of inferior quality/endurance. BUT nowhere close to what latest 3.5" disks are, where many of them have problems new out of the box.

konc wrote on 2022-02-08, 14:08:

dumpsterac1d wrote on 2022-02-08, 12:52:

Just to re-ask, are the "newer" 5.25 disks like the 2000s era disks, in that a lot of them are junk? Or is 5.25 stock generally good from any era of production

From personal observation which doesn't prove anything, disks produced closer to the end of their era are of inferior quality/endurance. BUT nowhere close to what latest 3.5" disks are, where many of them have problems new out of the box.

Yeah I kind of figured. Thank you

Deunan wrote on 2022-02-08, 14:00:

These floppies better be well packed when mailed 😀 Regarding age, newer 5.25 floppies might be of somewhat worse quality, yes. I remember having issues with seemingly good brand ones - BASF (so I didn't mention them) but it could've been fakes or poorly stored or shipped. That being said I'd argue the HD ones always felt a bit subpar compared to earlier DD floppies - no friction ring in the center, thinner envelope (or at least it felt like it's more bendy material), sleeves not glued together as well, cheap boxes. Well, Dysan made sturdy, plastic boxes for their 100 line, I miss those. Even the cardboard 2-piece ones (from 3M for example) were nice. Then came the usual thin paper boxes and +1/+2/+3 floppies offers - not saying those are definitely worse but, trying to fight the onslaught of 3.5" floppies, corners were surely cut somewhere.

At this point though there is nothing you can do but trust the seller, who might not know any better. Frankly I've had some good experiences lately with used floppies I got cheap, so don't worry too much. Better make sure you have clean, well-calibrated drive before blaming the media. And don't throw away good (especially plastic) boxes, I mean I would not want to pay for shipping to EU but I bet people on the other side of the pond would jump on those as well.

Thanks for the info. I'll be calibrating each of my drives once I get to that point just to be sure. and definitely I will be taking a gamble either way. I messaged the seller to see if they know who made the magnetic stock and if they know what conditions these were stored in (like, say if they were the original owner or worked for the original purchaser of the floppies). I don't anticipate very good responses, just because this seems like someone bought a LOT of floppies in the 2010s and are just offloading them bits at a time. Which is great, definitely, but who knows what could have happened between like 1993 and when they were bought for resale.

Yeah so the packaging I want to be somewhat premium, hard stock matte-printed boxes of a custom size (6 x 6 x 1) and maybe with custom inserts, I haven't decided yet. I believe within the US I can ship Media Mail which would bring shipping costs down quite a bit, but internationally it's going to be difficult to find pricing due to everything changing constantly. Hoping I can keep physical packaging and media costs down to 6usd per package (my cost), but with packaging, printing, labels, sleeves, one-sheets, bubble mailers, cardboard reinforcement, tape, etc I anticipate a bit more. Regardless, the media should be super safe by the time it reaches anywhere, it's just got to go through verification.

I have a box of JVC 5.25'' HD floppies I bought in the mid 90s, they all work perfectly to this day despite being written and re-written many times for over 20 years, and in some cases using really dodgy drives. Obviously it's a very small sample size to extract any statistical data about the brand, but it's amazing all of the disks are still working.

My experience with floppies and drives has been exactly the opposite depending on the type: 5.25'' floppies tend to be very reliable, while those drives fail a lot, in particular I struggle to find working HD drives. On the other hand, no 3.5'' drives have died on me (I've even managed to revive the non-working ones), but the disks seem to be really prone to failure.

I'm not sure whether modern shipment may destroy data on magnetic disks.

Modern magnets are hell for floppy disks.
My friend hast told me to keep magnetic disks away from Microsoft Surface Books because there is a magnet in.

Plase just keep me updated on the process.

I think the 5.25" disks sold by floppydisk.com are Athana brand, but you would have to confirm with them. They also do duplication and labeling. I have had good experience with Athana DS/DD but I don't have any DS/HD. Most bulk disks were used for software distribution, so they had to be at least decent quality.

Keep in mind that most "end-user" 5.25 disks like Maxell, etc have the labels already applied. You can label over them of course but it won't look as professional.

Plasma wrote on 2022-02-08, 18:24:

Keep in mind that most "end-user" 5.25 disks like Maxell, etc have the labels already applied. You can label over them of course but it won't look as professional.

Where I live the country/region distributor of programs and games on floppies sometimes used to just label over - my copy of LSL1 VGA is like that for example. So it's not any less professional than actual distribution back in the '90s. These floppies are SKC brand, a lesser known one but not a no-name. I would even argue it's more pro than the QfG3 box with it's generic blue floppies in white sleeves that could be anything, really. And I like those "fiber" sleeves more than generic paper ones - not saying those are better, but sure score way higher on nostalgia factor for me.

Anyway, custom labels are a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand they tell you what the disk is, and the assumption would be you won't erase it or reuse it. And that's fine. But on the other hand the labels get dirty if the disk is used often, usually can't be cleaned due to being paper, and yet leave a mess when the glue fails and the label peels off. I mean it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't, but since I deal with second hand floppies I sometimes wish people would not put any labels on them. Or scribble on the sleeves. Only makes the cleaning process longer and more difficult.

Well in the US, I've never seen professional, boxed software sold on over-labeled floppies. Very rarely was there any indication of the floppy brand anywhere including the sleeve.

Dysan floppies are the very best but I think OP will have difficulty even finding 500 of them, at any price.

I will def be self-duplicating these, simply because I can do something that takes forever on 3 machines and just chill out. Right now I'm not rushing this and just want to do it correctly. I've found that most of the pre-applied labels/stickers seem to come right off of consumer disks, so I'm not worried about that too much.

It's so weird because I kept thinking that floppydisk.com's prices were a bit off, but looking at it now it's actually not bad. If those are robust disks and I wanted to format these by hand (which might be a good way to weed out bad disks), 50 for 30 keeps the price a bit lower than a dollar per. Additionally, the 500 is optimistic for the full planned run of these so far, the first issue will be 100, so 60 dollars isn't that bad for the first run.

Regarding sleeves, I would absolutely love to get the fibrous older-style sleeves because they're so much more durable, but I really doubt I can find any number of them blank. I'll have to stick with printing on paper sleeves, or whatever I can get my hands on. TBH the more premium I go with this release the more expensive the process is, and while it would be super cool to have these nice touches, a lot of things I'll have to settle on just to keep the cost low and get these out the door. An example would be, yeah I'll make a custom box size that fits 5.25 floppies, but for the 3.5 floppy versions, I'm not going to have another box designed, and if I get an insert designed I MIGHT make the 3.5 floppy fit the insert but if I don't, that's just the way it has to be. I want these to be shelf-able, look similar to one another so they can sit side-by-side and look good, but also be functional. Idunno, I want to make a quality "thing". But trying to find 100% color floppies for each release is extremely overboard, and I feel like finding these specific floppy sleeves is kind of on that same level.

That being said, if anyone knows of, or has, a huge number of those fibrous 5.25 floppy covers in white, please hit me up!

Unfortunately I don't know anybody selling new tyvek sleeves. You might consider floppy jewel cases for the 3.5" disks.

Plasma wrote on 2022-02-08, 21:57:

Unfortunately I don't know anybody selling new tyvek sleeves. You might consider floppy jewel cases for the 3.5" disks.

So I might have a very tepid lead on old stock tyvek floppy disk sleeves, or at least a company who makes custom tyvek folders and used to make a lot of floppy sleeves. It's a long shot but I'm going to be calling them to see if they have any leftovers and would be willing to sell, and if not, get a price for making new ones.

Regarding packaging, I have an extremely good idea that will bring everything up another level. I can design custom dense foam inserts, and make a cutout for the 5.25, and then inlay another cutout for the 3.5 underneath/inside it, and then just use that insert for both editions. That lets me include labels for the other type of media not included, so people can copy their own floppy (lol) and complete the package, having both disks in one issue. Since the packaging is like 70% of the reason to buy these, might as well go all out.