Verbatum and Maxall are reputable brands but as always given the age expect some dudes.

Thanks. Back in late 80s and early 90s I was mostly buying 3M floppies. They were available where I lived and people were saying that they were decent, so I didn't really find out if other brands were good. Not that I know if these floppies are as old or if they are much newer ones.

You're welcome. I can understand that. I've used various brands over the years and at least for me anyway there hasn't been one brand that suck out as real bad. Other members might have different experiences of course no dought. Type of storage can have an affect I'd imagine.

For unused floppys, the way they were stored over the last decades is much more important than their brand.

I hoarded many boxes of Verbatim disks in 2009 during a stock clearance. They have the same packaging as the ones in your picture, so I'd roughly age them about 10ish years old.

I opened a box for general uses (MS-DOS boot, XP SATA, W98 USB driver, etc) and none of the disks have any defects so far.

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-19, 09:15:

For unused floppys, the way they were stored over the last decades is much more important than their brand.

This! Both brands are decent but not sure about age. None of that matters if they were stored in a shed with extreme hot/cold cycles.

Forgot to grab a box of floppies from a nice cool server room end of last year 🙁 I was leaving it till last minute as they were better off where they were then in my house where others are doing their part in helping global warming happen sooner.

I have no idea how they were stored, but if they are as new as 2009, wouldn't that make them those bad quality later floppies?

I also got these 2 packs of unused 5.25" floppies recently. I didn't have any 5.25" floppies before that so I didn't think too much about the quality when I got them.
At least I know names verbatim and maxell from optical media and cassette tapes but these brands "Precision" and "ELW" are totally unknown to me. Probably some cheap brands, right?

I rescued these (and more!) from an old employer when they relocated in 1991 - on the rare occasions I open a new box I've yet to find a bad one, so I'm guessing a quality brand and proper storage are key (mine have been in storage drawers away from sunlight, moisture and temperature fluctuations).

I've used Precision - Still have a opened but new box full of them, they all format without bad sectors.

I've got about 500 HD or so here, and I noticed that the ones made in the late 90s and early 2000s suck, no matter the brand. If you see a Staples branded one, just throw it at something, it will not have 0 bad sectors.

Sony,Verbatim, IBM, Dysan, Kodak, Maxell, those seem to hold up. Same goes for DD disks, mid 80s were the best for those. I think those are actually overall more stout as compared to HD.

Baoran wrote on 2020-01-20, 00:34:

At least I know names verbatim and maxell from optical media and cassette tapes but these brands "Precision" and "ELW" are totally unknown to me. Probably some cheap brands, right?

Precision was on the cheap side, true. Last year I got my hands on a large number of floppies from a friend, properly stored. To my surprise precision disks outlived many other brands in the pile. Especially the DD ones, not a single one of them had developed bad sectors. And those were heavily used disks that we used to copy, exchange and run games on PCs without a hard disk in the early 90s.

An interesting observation about Verbatim disks (both DD and HD):
These survived in great numbers

These on the contrary, out of more than 30 disks none made it

Dysan floppies are reliable in my experience. They also come in those nice solid red plastic boxes.

Since the box wasn't wrapped in clear plastic I did test one of those ELW disks in scandisk surface scan in dos 6.22 and no errors, so at least they are not all dead. When I checked them out I was positively surprised. They are orange in color and look really nice in my eyes.

Nashua, TDK and Fujifilm are also great.

My experience has been mixed.

I have some floppy disks from the 1980's or early 90's that simply refuse to die. I've been using and abusing them for years and nothing ever happens to them.

I have others that are NOS never used, and are either DOA or fail within the first usage.

When I was a kid in the 2000's I used to buy Fujifilm Mac-formatted disks and format them in DOS. Some of those disks are still working but most have died.

I don't know about quality, but in my experience, the less you format, the longer it lasts.

Why would formatting make a difference? I don't see formatting doing anything different to a floppy disk compared to normal writing...

Baoran wrote on 2020-01-22, 03:21:

Why would formatting make a difference? I don't see formatting doing anything different to a floppy disk compared to normal writing...

Does it? Seems like track 0's going bad after a format. The file table gets messed up and it can't be undone. Same as with CD-RWs.

I've managed to save a lot of 3.5" disks with track 0 errors as well as multiple bad sectors using Dave dunfields imagedisk 1.20 installed to a dos partitioned pc
(it has to be run from HD not floppy) and running the erase commands several times, then doing an unconditional Format.

Unfortunately the magnetic domains on a 3.5" floppy are close enough together they interact and will de-magnitize over time.
On a 5.25" floppy, they're more well spaced out and more stable. So despite 3.5" looking more "sturdy" being encased protected from the
elements with shutter and all , the format layout of the 5.25" standard is more reliable. This is why you can open a brand new sealed box of
3.5" disks and half of them won't even format.

Magnetic media was only ever intended to last 10-20 years as it's a fragile medium, but here we are 40 years+ later.

Obviously drives themselves as well as the media itself getting cheaper and less quality parts in the late 90's akin to how mechanical
keyboards made the transition mid 90's to cheaper membrane solutions which had a role to play, as does mold formation on the disks
which can be sometimes eradicated if you are lucky with a cotton swab dipped in isopropanol.

Also had a floppy with a track 0 error last week. I have a large surplus of nos floppies but I wanted to keep this one because it looks nice. 😀

After trying al kind of tools, reformatting, using different drives etc (which didn't work) I cleaned the floppy with isopropyl alcohol as a last resort. That solved the problem. Floppy surface looked clean before this treatment (so no mold etc) so not really know why this worked. After that I formatted it a couple of times and came back without bad sectors.