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From: tempest@wet.UUCP (Ken Lui)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Drilling holes in DS/DD -> DS/HD
Summary: Don't do it--you'll be sorry.
Message-ID: <864@wet.UUCP>
Date: 15 Dec 89 02:55:26 GMT
References: <16918215MES@MSU> <89347.194237CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET>
Reply-To: tempest@wet.UUCP (Ken Lui)
Organization: Wetware Diversions, San Francisco
Lines: 30

In article <89347.194237CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET> CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET (Christopher Tate) writes:
>In article <16918215MES@MSU>, <18215MES@MSU.BITNET> says:
>
>>A student friend of mine said that a buddy of his drilled a hole
>>in his DS/DD 3.5" floppy to convert it to a High Density disk,
>>and IT WORKED! I know this is probably not advisable, but
...
>
>Sure, this will work, but dollars to doughnuts says that you'll get a lot
>more than your share of disk crashes on the modified disks.  The medium on
>the 800K disks simply isn't designed to maintain that high a density of
>magnetic polarity changes.
...

Christopher is absolutely correct.  I asked this question to a
tech at work and he said that in order to store the extra
information onto 1.44MByte diskettes, the disks rotate slower
than a normal drive and higher fluxes are applied to the magnetic
media.  The double-density diskettes just won't be able to retain
a higher charge for an extended length of time.  This is the main
reason why it seems to work at first, then some time down the
road, the data may become irretrievable.  Different magnetic
materials exist in double-density and high-density disks.

Ken
-- 
_____________________________________________________________________________
     Kenneth K.F. Lui	   |  UUCP:	...{ucsfcca|claris}!wet!tempest
     tempest@wet.UUCP	   |  Internet:	cca.ucsf.edu!wet!tempest@cgl.ucsf.edu
			   |	-or- 	claris!wet!tempest@ames.arc.nasa.gov