Considering I no longer use them, way more than is healthy 😀 (that includes the drives as well)

5.25" - maybe round about 100, of which 60 are brand new and those boxes still have their cellophane wrappers on. Nearly all HD format / 3M branded

3.5" - maybe round about 750, of which 200 are brand new and those boxes still have their cellophane wrappers on. Nearly all HD format / 3M branded, though some of the later ones are Imation branded.

Most of these were rescued in the late 80s / early 90s when a business I worked for relocated.

There must also be 100 or so disks recovered from old software packages.

LS-120 - did have some, but sold them off a year or two back

3.5" MO disks - maybe round about 35, nearly all brand new. Mainly 230MB (TDK / Verbatim branded) and the rest 640MB (Philips branded), and yes I do have the drives as well, both Fujitsu SCSI and Philips IDE

Does anyone have experience with those exotic "mode 3" Japanese floppy drives?

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.

Floppies manufactured in the 2000s were notoriously unreliable. I don't know the reason for this. Disks made in the 1990s are still reliable today.

ab0tj wrote:

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.

This sounds interesting. What systems that use 8" disks do you have? I assume they are CP/M?

Not sure how many I have but they are a mix of mostly 3.5" followed by some 5.25" and even a number of Amstrad CPC 3". Spent a couple of days last year making images of them just in case some of them decide to go bad (not the 3" though, not even sure if it would be possible to make images of those).

Even found that the two 3.5" disks from my school days (very early 90's (maybe even very later 80's ... and now I feel old)) that were used in Archimedes still work after all these years (had to resort to emulation to figure out they were ok) very surprising that they were alive and working after all the wear and tear they must have sustained over the years of being in school machines.

Not an exact count, but I have over 100 3.5" 1.44MB disks and around 30-40 5.25" 360KB disks.

The disks weren't stored very well so there are loads of bad, defective or dying disks among them. I literally picked out 10 of the best 3.5" disks and keep them handy for any retro PC emergencies. Though I do now own a Gotek so even those are kind of redundant too.

You'd think with that many 3.5" disks there would be some interesting software. Sadly that's not the case, it's mostly around 50 copies of EasyPC magazine cover disks that have mostly all been formatted over. I got a bunch of them for free back in the early 2000s, old stock that was getting chucked out.

At present I'm using some 3.5" disks with the hole covered and formatted to 720KB for use on my XT build. That old XT refuses to cooperate with the Gotek and it's default firmware, so I have to make do.

I do have a box of 5.25" floppies that I got from a friend who acquired them from somewhere back in the 1990s. They are not IBM PC compatible disks and I have no idea what format they're in, what system they are from, nor what's even on them. I'm going to hook up my 5.25" drive at some point and run OmniFlop to try and discover what treasures these may or may not be hiding. 🤣 Hopefully they're in a format capable of being read by some existing computer emulator.

As of the typing of this post, this is what I have for each type:

5.25" - Bought 15 of them just recently, 14 of them are part of a pack a Maxell diskettes, mostly 1.2MB (High Density).

3.5" - 92 altogether, I have 40 of them on my desk and the rest are kept as spares in my cabinet, two of them are 720K 3M diskettes and the rest are 1.44MB disks of varying brands (mostly Fujifilm*, Sony**, 3M, and Verbatim). I mostly use them to provide drivers/software/files for machines that are too old to work with USB mass storage devices.

* Manufactured in the '90s, before they cheaped out on floppies.
** Mix of the older good quality disks (from the '90s), and a couple bad ones that were from a NOS purchase in 2011.

ZIP - I have 5 100MB disks, and a 250MB disk. I have a working 250MB USB ZIP drive (it can still be used on Windows 10!) and a couple 100MB parallel drives in unknown condition (I need to test those soon).

I have about 40/50 3.5'' disks and a LOT of them have gone bad... Thank god i discovered the Gotek floppy drive emulator and i will never ever use those bad sectoring bastards again! 🤣

The Gotek is truly amazing and it so happens to be that another one is on the way as we speak... a '' must have device'' if you ask me when retro computing is your hobby.

I have 10 box (some still sealed) of 10 floppies, and i guess 5 or 6 laying around.

Haha what an on-point thread! I'm sitting here converting the most used ones into a GOTEK USB as I write this.

I probably have... Shit... A guess would be 250-350 HD 3.5 inch diskettes, about 30 DD, probably close to 100 DD 5.25, maybe 20 HD.

I also have about 20-25 ZIP100 diskettes, and somewhere I have a single 8 inch diskette (I had a factory sealed box of IBM ones I sold on eBay 10 years ago to buy college books - sorta regret that now) - What do I do with them? Use them of course! I'm staggered at the durability of these things, especially the Double Density 3.5s that I drilled the 1.44 Mb hole out of and reformatted... 25 years ago. I've been using those to install Windows 3.0 ever since.

23 High Density and 21 Double Density. They all formatted correctly last I checked. I'll probably see if I can send them to a new home thru ebay sooner or later. I'm not using them and they are going to be scarce in coming years so I would rather someone make good use of them before bitrot claims them

About 200-300 3.5 and 100 5.25 discs. Plus those of my original games.
What really amaises me is how tough some things are. I recently bought Falcon ('87) and i once long ago bought the original Pirates!. Both are working perfectly. I can play 30 year old games on equally old hardware today; this is cool.
On a sidenote, young and stupid as i was back then, when i bought Pirates! i threw away the box 🙁...

As with CDs, it helps if they're stored in cool, dark and dry environments. Also as with CDs, 5.25" floppies shouldn't be stacked on top of each other.