Whatever you can find, I expect.

Ultimately, you would probably be better off getting a Gotek and being done with it. I understand they are very affordable these days.

The only reliable floppy's nowadays are the USB ones on my Gotek.

Get a Gotek drive.

Then you can just keep a regular USB floppy drive around for when you need to make images.

I've got a huge number of HD floppy disks and only ever get them when I find them for really cheap at the thrift store or when I get them for free.

Even brand new, they are getting to be really iffy these days. Same for the drives.

To be fair, they were crap when they were relevant.

I use floppies to configure compaq EISA, which I have two: Deskpro M and Proliant 1500, which requires 4 disks set. I'm running out of pack of 10. I have computers with 3.5 floppy drives.

Which Gotek, quality and real one, not fakes, and mods to make it worth it? I hear that little display (the one with color OLED) and knob encoder mod is best way?

Cheers,

IMHO, there are 3 main things to consider .
a) floppies do not get better with age . How much they have degraded compared to when new will depend on factors such as quality and storage environment (humidity, temperature, temperature variations)
b) As floppies started to decline from being a dominant portable storage medium up until they became an afterthought, prices went down and so did quality
c) Brand name on floppies actually meant something when the brand owner actually manufactured the floppies or at least subcontracted manufacture to a reliable manufacturer . As "b" progressed, brand stopped meaning much .

Again, IMHO, if you want the best possible floppies, you should try to find new old stock sealed boxes of floppies from before 2000, ideally from somewhere in the mid nineties or so . You can only hope that they were kept in a stable environment . My choices for brand would be 3M from when they were still manufacturing floppies in the USA and, as such, presumably in their own factories or from Maxell, Sony or another Japanese company from when manufacturing was still done in Japan, also presumably in their own factories .

Just my 2 cents .

EDIT : That said, going Gotek is probably the best long term solution, though, TBH, my new old stock Maxell disks from the late 90s work just fine in all my drives .

EDIT : just to be clear, outsourced manufacturing can produce great results, but when the outsourcing is done under intense price pressure combined with decreasing demand for an increasingly obsolete product, I strongly doubt that product quality is all that high on the list of priorities .

I use Maxell, Sony , TDK and Fuji if I can get them. Sure a Gotek is nice but am not going to open up a perfectly working vintage to attach one just to transfer a few files if it has a good floppy drive already installed.
But I tend to try and stay somewhat era oriented and a Gotek just does not cut it for me on a XT, 286 , 386 or early 486 if is already a complete machine with floppies. Just my opinion.
Added: Agree Darry !

texterted wrote on 2021-03-03, 04:16:

To be fair, they were crap when they were relevant.

If we're speaking of the 2000s onwards, then yes, I agree.

Not in the 70s, 80s and 90s, though. In that time line, quality still mattered.

Any manufacturer who tried to sell low quality floppies would have had been boycotted by users.
Because, floppies often held critical data which someone's job did depend on.

Problems we have now, I think:
a) NOS floppies from the 90s are rare and have more aged
b) People unlearned how to properly store floppies:
Dark space that's not dusty or too humid, that has room temperature.
Floppies are in (paper) protective sleeves, 3.5" disks, too!
Multiple disks are stored pressure-free in diskettes boxes.
Floppies are stored in a place that's not close to electromagnetic fields.
So in essence : Don't put throw your floppies in your desk's drawer to all the other junk. 😉

Guess I'm lucky, as I have maybe 20 still shrink-wrapped boxes of 3M 3.5s + 6 3M 5.25s from the mid to late 90s that I'll probably never use as, I have so many used 3M disks from the same period that are still going strong.

texterted wrote on 2021-03-03, 04:16:

To be fair, they were crap when they were relevant.

True, I hated 90's 3.5 disks with a passion.
They were okay when you didn't want to use the whole disk space but a third of them failed the first time you stored .arj volumes on them.
I mostly used TDKs, 3Ms and Maxells and they were all like this. 25 years later most of them are unreadable but that's probably due to the poor storage conditions.
To be honest these disks were fairly cheap so no wonder their quality was so bad, I'm sure there were high quality brands available.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-03-03, 04:20:

I use floppies to configure compaq EISA, which I have two: Deskpro M and Proliant 1500, which requires 4 disks set. I'm running out of pack of 10. I have computers with 3.5 floppy drives.

Which Gotek, quality and real one, not fakes, and mods to make it worth it? I hear that little display (the one with color OLED) and knob encoder mod is best way?

Cheers,

If all you want is basic 1.44 boot or driver disks the standard cheap Gotek's on ebay are fine
The biggest drawback is you cant read the USB stick in a standard USB port, so ideally you want a Gotek in the PC your using to write the disk image to the stick and another in the PC your working on (or move the gotek from PC to PC as well)
You can use Gotek's software to write the image to disk but it's pretty crap.

Modded ones allow you simply copy the img file to the USB from a standard port and the firmware will do the work, it also allows different size disks. standard firmware only allows for 1.44mb

I've only got 486's and up (including a Prolient 1600) which means I have no need for anything but 1.44 disks and the basic drive is so cheap I put one in every PC that has floppy support. So have 8 total now. but man it makes rebuilds easy, even XP SATA drivers are quicker to just use the disk option then have to inject the drivers into an image now.

SATA, bought two 3ware 4x SATA cards which use 128MB module (notebook type), on PCI-X but I'll try it as one disk on PCI slot if it is perfect compatiblity with DOS. I already have PATA x2 3ware and loved them.

Forgot about Fuji brand.

Is there a way to purchase gotek emulators from any sellers (not Chinese!) who bought direct from german maker?

Cheers,