This gives them tremendous advantage in reliability, as with wide and sparse tracks there is huge margin for error.Įven the newest 8' floppy disks must be around 25 years old (at least).ĭo not underestimate the power of a large, government organization. They have pretty small capacity compared to their size - the largest ever are barely 1.2MB. The usage of one of the oldest, 8' floppies is also not surprising here. Home and office floppies fail due to mishandling, physical damage, being put too close to speaker, getting dirty, etc - all those failure modes are well known and easily preventable with procedures. Of course, under very strict handling and storage conditions - but the point is that no other popular writable media can come even close to 30 years figure. Typical streamer tapes are often guaranteed for 30 years. If you see that, I'd say you've got time to image the disk before throwing it away and then perhaps cleaning your drive head.Ĭan you take these disks off the shelf 30 years later and still expect to read their data? Yes.Īlthough we all experienced floppies fragility, the magnetic media in fact is one of the longest-living we can practically manufacture. However, I will state that you can visibly see if a disk is 'dead' physically by looking for small dark spots on the medium (not referring to mold but natural oxidation).

In general, I think it is hard to come up with an answer for this since nobody really seemed to perform studies on this back in the day probably because nobody assumed the technology would still be in use 30 years later. Some that I have in my collection that were sold as 'high quality' back in the early 90's are questionable today at best while a repurposed America Online 3.5' from the same period is almost certainly not going to still hold its original contents. While 5.25' disks seem to have held up over the years, I can say that 3.5' disks were obviously cost reduced and of much lower quality.

The formula wasn't always consistent for a brand I've got old Maxell 5.25' disks of the same model from 1983 which are a distinct mocha color versus a darker brown starting in 1985.

How many hours of use did the disk experience.Īssuming little-to-no use, it probably comes down mostly to quality of the floppy disk media which tends to vary across manufacturers and even production year.

What format is a floppy disk