Comment by kalcode
21 hours ago
This isn't like COBOL. Floppy disc were never reliable. They should've been phased out a long time ago
Magnetic degradation, wear from read/write heads, and environmental sensitivity mean disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long. And they are also easy to corrupt from all kinds of magnetic sources around us.
I get other stuff, even DOS like system. Safety critical software/hardware that was battle tested makes sense. Not floppy. Sometime it's just bureaucracy.
My floppies outlived many many models of usb thumb drives. I can still read floppies I recorded 30 years ago.
And I went through dozens looking for one that worked. Ymmv.
My experience has been both. I remember, years ago, occasionally having the problem of going through many to find one with no bad sectors. But, a few years back, I dumped all my old floppies, and very few of them had issues.
I wonder if quality control was bad. It seems like the disks that were good 30 years ago are still good.
Me too, and I didn't need to wait 30 years for that. They were corrupted when floppies were still the default.
My Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked. They were probably kept dry the hole time, but I did move several times, they were in boxes in cellars and in garages.
> were never reliable
They absolutely mog the cancerous garbage that is NAND flash memory in terms of data retention. The fact that you can pick an 1980s floppy from the junk room and read it is telling. Meanwhile your average TLC SSD will probably get wiped in 3 years if kept in the drawer, and a QLC will get wiped in 1 year.
Reliability wise floppies are also better: flash memory leaks electrons naturally and gets shredded by radiation events, with temperaure accelerating these processes. Meanwhile magnetic disks are not altered by any normal magnetic field you could produce at home.
Survivorship bias. Floppies failed all the time. Flash can be unreliable if you’re talking about the cheapest or abused the wrong way, but flash SSDs handled wisely are much better than hdds , which in turn are much better than floppies.
If you compare the thumb stick that came free from a convention then compare it to a floppy that came free with a magazine. And in the end neither matters because they’re both cheapest possible junk, not fair examples of the tech.
Similarly, the cheapest led bulbs (put in poorly ventilated fittings) have crappy lifetimes, but that’s not the techs fault, it’s because they weren’t engineered to last, they are cheap crap. Well designed leds placed sensibly are vastly better than bulbs, but that’s hidden by the cheap end of the market
That is the first I ever saw the term "mog" used outside of bodybuiy/looksmaxxing.
More info here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mog
This is just flatly false. You're comparing a worst case SSD with maybe 10% of its writes left to an extremely lucky floppy disk that hasn't died to binder hydrolysis, mold and fungal growth, warping or demagnetization. And you also completely made up that you couldn't generate a strong enough magnetic field at home to corrupt one - you absolutely could especially since rare earth magnets are not that uncommon and are more than enough to kill a floppy.
"mog"?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/mog
There's flash, and then there's flash.
Say, the Siemens PLCs I earn my living programming uses SD cards which range from 64kB to, uh, 128MB, methinks.
They still work after decades, so clearly, you can get long term reliable flash storage; just don't expect to be able to store your 4k holiday videos on them.
NOTAMs, on the other hand? Go ahead!
my 1980s 5.25" disks still work. i'm surprised but they have laster a long time.
I used to do floppy disk data recovery as a service for students at college. Roughly speaking, we helped one student out every three hours, out of 2,500 students, during busy hours. Based on the rates and hours, I think it would come out to something like 25% of the student body, each year, coming to us with a data loss incident involving floppy disks.
YMMV. I’m sure a lot of people were shoving these things into backpacks, and this was post-2000, so the quality of disks for sale was poorer than it was in the 90s and 80s.
I’ve also (since then, for myself) repaired drives. The drives fail because they’re mechanical and have motors, and anything that moves or has a motor in it will need some kind of service. Servicing a floppy drive requires specialized equipment which is hard to find (or requires a lot of patience—it’s possible to repair a floppy drive with just a screwdriver, but it’s not fun; guess how I know?)
3.5" disks were much much worse.
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3.5" floppies were still common while I was in college. I have distinct memories of copying a project to a floppy in my dorm room, popping the disk out, walking next door (literally next door in the dorms, not even going outside up or down stairs or anything), popping the disk into a team member's PC and the project being gone. We laughed it off and chucked the disk in the trash and got another. Project wasn't lost-lost since I had a copy on my hard disk. This was also the era of the 100MB Zip Drives, which I also had in my PC and thankfully all of our lab PCs had, too. That's what I normally used for all of my day-to-day file transfers of any real import. I still have my zip disks, but I seem to have lost my zip drive, so no idea if the disks still have any data on them.
I was on a school paper in high school and was taking photos on a "digital" camera that wrote to 3.5" floppies. Some of them are still with the (printed) copies of my articles I kept. I'll have to see if they survived.
This is probably my "I'm getting old" moment. Good lord.
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Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
Wow, it's crazy how experiences differ! I've never encountered anything more unreliable than zip disks. Even burned CDs lost to the dreaded buffer couldn't compete with the failure rate of those things. Past me wishes I had your luck with them, they were super cool.
We used to copy files three times, better onto three separate floppies
I said this in a parallel thread but 3.5" disks were much less reliable for me even in the 80s with the Amiga.
You had personal PCs but no network in a dorm?
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Until quite recently, my Dad had a Zip drive plugged into an ancient Pentium box (back when "Pentium" meant "successor to 486"). I don't know when it was last actually used, but it's LED had been on since the 90s.
Sure, but what are the odds they're using these rather than HD 3.5" disks purchased from whatever new old stock they've been able to source over the past 20-odd years?
and how many bits have rotted on those?
I am still able to play all the games on them and recovered my terminal program I wrote in the 80s as well:
https://github.com/spullara/pcterm128
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> disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long
You really have no idea what you are talking about. It's normal for floppies, especially 3.5" to last decades just sitting on a shelf. I've got 5.25" floppies from 1984, and they boot just fine on my old apple //e.
42 years in my parent's dank midwest basement.
Of course some will last longer. It's not a cliff, just "not recommended to use for longer than...". But a lot depends on the conditions of storage, how much usage they got, etc. Manufacturers gave them 10-20 years normally, which puts almost all of them in the not recommended territory.
The fact people have old working floppies doesn't change the fact that degradation happens.
Why do you write it as “Apple forward slash forward slash E”?
If i remember correctly that Apple //E used that notation itself in its startup message and on various screens in AppleWorks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe
Check the logo on the picture on the right.
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I remember losing half the light cues for a show because we tried to reload from the 3.5" floppy and it was corrupted.
Your writing like checksums aren’t existing. They exist!
I’ve bought some 15 year old floppies recently. They work. Had just to learn, that formatting them is required. In handling they are like SD-Cards.
Which is far better than the CDs, DVDs, Bluerays or records (you now…this big black discs with a needle).
And you don’t have to worry about network attackers. And we checksum everything from the network. For good reasons.
The more expensive blurays are quite long lasting, being non-dye based.
Absent doing something wildly abusive, vinyl records will play fine for a long time. And the degradation is comparatively graceful.
Source: go to any used record shop and find a copy of Chicago >5[0]. It'll almost certainly play, even if the music wasn't particularly good to start with.
[0] There are many copies of later Chicago albums in used record stores.
I'd learned long ago to treat floppies like Mission Impossible tape reels, and just assume the data would self-destruct in about 5 seconds.
And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive and it’s not because usb drives are reliable.
Without having details on the specific floppy disks in question there’s no way you can authoritatively say they are unreliable. They absolutely produced floppy disks that were far more reliable than the ones sourced from the cheapest vendor possible some of us used in school back in the day. Ignoring the fact I’m guessing the disks in question aren’t having to survive life in a students backpack.
Ohhh, don't compare magnetic backup tapes to floppy. Same designs underneath but completely different storage shell, delivery mechanism, even the coating is different.
One cost $100 another $1.
Then these tapes are typically write once read many.
They were designed to deal with floppy disk flaws consumers deal with.
Actually really cool to read about modern tape systems.
I had a customer with a slightly dusty office and we simply gave up on tape drives as a backup storage medium because we were replacing the drives or tapes on a monthly basis.
We switched them over to external USB enclosures with cheap SATA drives in them and never looked back.
> And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive
Is it because "long-term archival" strategies aren't updated frequently?
It's because magnetic storage where the drive bearings are separated from the media can be expected to sit on properly temperature controlled shelf for 50 years with next to no bit rot, in contrast to flash.
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What would you have suggested in the 1980s instead of a floppy disk? And today?
If you have enough floppy disks they are a perfectly reliable solution.
50% of the time it works every time!
And yet they’ll replace it with some cloud-native monstrosity that will get hacked by an unhinged GPT.
Say what you will about floppies. There’s something to be said for a system that’s air-gapped by default.