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From: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vincent Manis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Bad floppies
Message-ID: <1310@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 2-May-87 16:01:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.1310
Posted: Sat May  2 16:01:07 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 6-May-87 04:49:28 EDT
References: <8704272002.AA29448@mitre-bedford.ARPA> <3682@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <289@homxc.UUCP>
Reply-To: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vincent Manis)
Distribution: world
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science
Lines: 37

In article <289@homxc.UUCP> jdn@homxc.UUCP (J.NAGY) writes:
>What have other peoples' experiences been with the various brands
>of micro-floppies available?

I've found that Sony and Fuji seem to be pretty good, while "no-names" seem
to span a pretty broad quality control range. I've now settled on buying
those two brands (either of which is generally on sale at less than the list
price, if you're careful, without going the mail-order route).

I have had one interesting experience: when I moved up from a Mac to an ST,
I was left with several dozen ssdd disks which were really of no use to me.
Most of these disks were acquired a couple of years ago, at a time when one
rarely saw dsdd disks anywhere (at least in Vancouver). They were all Sony.

I've found that almost all of these will format dsdd with no problems (i.e.,
Format reports 726016 bytes), and, in general, I've had no data loss
problems with them. (Anything *really* important goes on new dsdd disks; I
may be stingy, but I'm not foolish.) However, ssdd disks which were acquired
within (say) the last year or so seem to be much riskier, and, in general,
they aren't worth the trouble.

Conjecture: at one time, Sony (at least) was not bothering to differentiate
between single and double sided. Anything that passed the single-sided test
was marketed that way (presumably because the dsdd market was limited to
low-volume machines such as the DG1). Now that dsdd disks are more in
demand, they test disks as double-sided, and only market disks as
single-sided if they fail the double test. 

-----
Vincent Manis                {seismo,uw-beaver}!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!manis
Dept. of Computer Science    manis@cs.ubc.cdn
Univ. of British Columbia    manis%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa  
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5      manis@ubc.csnet
(604) 228-6770 or 228-3061

"The difference between capitalism and communism is obvious: under capitalism,
 man exploits man, while under communism, it is exactly the opposite."