infiniteclouds wrote:

Aside from convenience, people have stated they use a floppy emulator because floppy disks are simply not reliable. I remember this being the case but further reading suggests it is just a matter of QA - that during the twilight era of floppy drives companies just churned out garbage.

I think the same. I think that's not true what people say. Well, not entirely. I've got an original 5.25" copy of Leisue Suit Larry from '87
and it is in very good condition. Same is true for my ~'86 copy of StarFlight, no read-errors so far.
Even the late 80s / early 90s backup disks of my dad are still readable.

IMHO, that opinion comes from the fact that people didn't handle their floppies with the care they required.
Pretty much like CD-ROMs have their jewel-cases, both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks need a sleeve or at least their own diskette box.
If they are left without protection in a cupboard or on a desk, they are exposed to dust, oxygen and humidity/temperature
which all shortens their lifetime (I could also add earth's magnetic field, but then none would take me serious anymore, hah. ^^).

Another factor is production quality, as you said. Floppy disks from the "floppy eras" are of higher quality,
than those from the 2000s when they became a "soon to be dead-medium".

That also affected the drives, themselfes, I guess. Plus, In the late 90s, PC electronics generally moved torwards 3.3v (prev. 5v).
This could have had an impact to the read/write current of the drive's heads or something like that.
Maybe it also caused compatibility issues with older floppy controllers that used 5v signaling, dunno. 😕

infiniteclouds wrote:

So what are some quality brands or things to look for when shopping for floppies? (3.5)

Oy, that's really hard to tell! Personally, I've had a good experience with these brands:

EMTEC, Fuji Film, Boeder, Verbatim, Sony, BASF (?)

(Anyway, I can't guarantee anything. Maybe I was just lucky.)

Sony disks are not really hard to find and are probably one of the most reliable imo. A friend told me that KAO floppies are really good too, but he lives in canada, and I've only found 7 of them yet ... But they didn't give me any problems so far.

I wouldn't recommend fuji films : I bought 90 of them brand new (still sealed) and when I open up a box and re-format almost any of the disks inside, I get bad sectors. They're probably recoverable, but that just shows how durable fuji film disks are : they demagnetize before even being used once while I've got some floppy disks from the mid 80's to late 80's disks from other brands that still work perfectly fine ! Though these disks seems to be from the 2000's ...

The rule is often : avoid anything from the late 90's and the 2000's

I also like to stick to real floppy disks whenever possible and am a fan of Memorex disks. I've bought several NOS boxes of both 2SHD and 2S2D Memorex disks (all from 1992/1993) for my DOS/Win9x PCs and Amiga 500 and they've all been fantastic. The other part of the equation is definitely a good quality/condition floppy drive. I've cleaned mine all out quite thoroughly and they've served me quite well.

I'm a fan of the Sony and IBM branded diskettes. I believe IBM started manufacturing 3.5" disks pretty late, and they were likely rebranded. I bought a box of 50 around 2000 or so and haven't had any go bad yet.

My best advice is to try to look for unused/sealed floppies, keep them in a hard shell container in a climate controlled environment and they will last. I bought a huge lot of unopened DYSAN brand Mac formatted floppies (10 packs, each comes in a hard shell container), I've had no formatting errors and no problems with any of the data yet. I was also digging through an old floppy carrying case of mine that was stored in a closet for ~20 years with school projects and they all seem fine as well. Disks that were loose and thrown around in boxes in the attic on the other hand have gone bad, so proper storage is key.

The only brand I've ever had trouble with (maybe due to bad luck) are those cheap Imation brand transparent colored disks from the late 90s early 00s. I had gotten two large packs of them, the ones that worked still work, but most of them couldn't be formatted from the get go.

Also, there's simply no reason not to back up anything you put on floppies to hard disks, flash drives, etc to be extra safe. Nothing to worry about.

Stay away from anything MEMOREX.

Remember a similar topic about 5 years ago? if you want to try dig that up.
While some brands are better then others, I still wouldn't call any reliable, they are just to vulnerable to environmental factors like dust, humidity, etc.
Totally agree with you though, got a few gotek drives, but sometimes you just NEED to use a floppy!
I do what I always did, just grab whatever I find and use it to death.

Imation floppies are some of the best in my opinion. 3M are also pretty good. EMTEC not so mutch.

Any old disk is reliable for months or years after writing. Longer term there's very little solid data for recommendations, because there's going to be variation between manufacturing lines and all the variables in storage conditions come into play. No floppy is exactly fresh from the factory anymore.

My best and worst experiences were both late 90's TDK, also had some era Maxell disks fail to read after a couple years.

From my experience, you had crappy floppies and good floppies back in the early 90's just as you had crappy and good video tapes.

We used Brother and TDK floppy disks the most with very few "dead" floppies - a few weeks ago, I went through all my old floppies and only one failed to read from that brand, and it was one that got used LOADS as my father's own "work disk".

On the other hand, my friend used a different brand which I can't recall right now - bought from a Vietnamese computer store - and he had failed disks all the time. I still had some lying around which were used for school work back in the days and you could hear from the sound the disk drive was making that they weren't quite as good. Lots of repeated reading and one disk even failed completely.

However, later floppies were generally pretty crap, even big-brand ones. In 1999 I bought hundreds of Sony floppies because I got access to my brother's college computer room which had Internet access and I fell in love with Home of the Underdogs which had thousands of games and floppies were the only way to get the games off of them. These floppies died VERY quickly. After a few uses, I already got bad sectors.

Having said all that, the older floppies were almost exclusively used with IBM PCs which had high quality floppy drives and I can imagine that cheap and more recent floppy drives weren't the best quality (same as later VCR and cassette players tended to damage the tapes) so the Sony disks may have gotten damaged by the floppy drives too because these were from modern PCs. In fact, my Pentium III was the last one to even have a floppy drive.

infiniteclouds wrote:

So I have a USB floppy emulator and it's great but since I've recovered an old Dell XPS with a floppy drive in it I have had the urge to use floppies again. Aside from convenience, people have stated they use a floppy emulator because floppy disks are simply not reliable. I remember this being the case but further reading suggests it is just a matter of QA - that during the twilight era of floppy drives companies just churned out garbage.

So what are some quality brands or things to look for when shopping for floppies? (3.5)

The disks that have survived the longest in my collection, are 3M disks bought back in 1994.
The next best are other major brands such as Sony and Verbatim.
The worst ones are just those noname, sold in white boxes with floppy-disk written on it.