Re: Floppy drive failures

[jurgen36]

We did run some test's with new floppy drives and found that most of them (10 out of 11 brands) do not meet the specifications. We tested the newly formated floppy's and could see that the tracks were formated with very narrow magnetic information. We now had a big job and replaced all our floppy drives with secondhand drives manufactured before 1997. All the disk's we could not read or format work now ok. Originally I tended to blame winxp but this time it was not the culprit. May be this helps somebody. Get old drives and the problems are gone. Regards

Jurgen

 

[ski]

Quality control has apparantly gone down the drain for some old technology. Unfortunately, some old technology is still useful.

 

[ski]

And thanks for the heads up, Jurgen.

 

[rwullems]

hhhhhhhhhmmmmm,

sounds very familiar. Had something very like that with some Dell systems. First i tought it were the floppy's, who became unreadable, but after some testing with other brands of floppy's and some old IBM laptops and desktops, it looked very much like it was the floppy drive on the two involved Dell systems.

Mayby that is why Dell is not delivering any floppy drives anymore standard on their system? (Just joking....)

 

[chriseubank]

Maybe I should hang onto my commodore 64's then huh? They might make good firewall devices someday.. <LOL>

 

[dakota81]

Which one manufacturer of the 11 you tested met the specifications in their floppy drives?

 

[BadBigBen]

@ChrisEubanks - Nope you are out of luck... Commodore as a Manufacturer doesn't exist anymore... (BWAH, they made the best computers in their Time - The AMIGA, the first true Multitasking Computer)... btw. I do have a C128D and a SX-64, aswell as one Amiga500+, Amiga600, Amiga1200, and Two PC's now... hmmm. might open up a Museum...

@Jurgen36 - thnx for the info, I am glad I got five drives all pre 97 (two even pre 90)... all functioning...


Ben

 

[jurgen36]

re: BadBigBen
Not five drives, we have 400 plus machines. Raided the junked PC's. Now all work again with floppy's. I had to do this as our students normally do their assignments at home on floppy disks. Regards

Jurgen

 

[SkipCox]

Jurgen,

Saw this the other day when you posted it. Knowing your location, I didn't thing the post was much more than interesting (bad batch?).

Well, in the middle of California today, I ran into the same "doa" slew of floppies (different brands). Solution was to pull an original Teac from my 386/33 and get on with our lives. We'll find time tomorrow to return our stock of 8 drives bought at different stores for some that may or may not work.

Sure glad I read your post on Monday.

Skip

http://home.comcast.net/~skip9/index.html

http://scc.i8.com

 

[BadBigBen]

re: Jurgen36 - well that is the difference between a HOBBY HardwareGuru and a Professional HardwareGuru...

Ben

 

[willcomp]

Very interesting. Have noticed same thing. Treat every working older Teac or Panasonic FDD with TLC, you may need them.

Also have noticed that floppy discs themselves have become less reliable.

For now, they are indispensible for service techs.

 

[stallard]

I've actually stopped using FDD's as they became so unrealiable.

 

[SkipCox]

We use a couple of floppys a week to restore and back up POS systems. I agree that the quality of disks has gone to hell and after this week, I'll not show up without at least two new tested fdd's.

The 8 fdd's I spoke of came from 3 different retailers and 2 of the 3 offered us a tray to test. Both offers were accepted and after testing 24 drives, we found only one doa.
The other store replace the two drives we bought there and both tested good.

Still don't know for sure if it's a trend (likely) or just the luck of the draw. At this point, I think Jurgen is on to something and each and every new floppy we put into inventory will be tested first.



Skip

http://home.comcast.net/~skip9/index.html

http://scc.i8.com

 

[jurgen36]

Some further info. The drive which worked within spec's was a Sony. All the tested drives worked ok if you used new disk's and formated them. However if you tried to use the newly formated disk's in other machines they showed as unformated or full of errors. This was the reason that we pulled the floppy disk's apart and tested them in our lab. We found that the magnetic tracks were to narrow, it almost looked during analysis that they were written by IBM 2.8 Mbyte drives. Also the tracks apeared to be waving all over the place. In comparisation the old used drives did write with a 56% wider track and showed no waving motion at all. I do believe it is simply quality controll. The drives are so cheap that nobody cares anymore. Unfortunately we do need them at the Uni. The floppy disk's seem to be ok, regardless of manufacturer. Regards

Jurgen