I am clinging to my Roland MC-50 and KNEW I shoulda bought a truckload of DOUBLE density 3.5" disks way back in the stone ages ("Doh!"), but I didn't. Does anybody know where I can get these relatively cheap? Is there any alternative such as reliably using high density instead? I wish I could just run out and buy a new machine with better storage options but my 19 kids need shoes and the cat needs a operation so the money's tight. Thanks very much!!
Shoppy I can swappy my floppy?
- Thread starter kaptaink
- Start date
Slackmaster2K
Gone
We are just talking regular 3.5" floppies right? Why are they expensive...you can't be THAT poor 
I believe...if I can remember this far back......that double density disks were the 720Kb variety, while "High Density" were 1.44MB. Now you can format a 1.44MB "high density" as a "double density" 720Kb, but you can't format a 720Kb disk to be a 1.44 (duh). So if you REQUIRE double density, you should be ok buying high density. If you need help formatting disks just ask.
Anyway, good luck finding reliable floppies. They're just not wanted anymore. People use floppies for boot disks and maybe a little bit of file mobility but that's it. Realizing this, manufacturers are slacking big time.
I would say that given a box of any brand of relatively decent floppies, about 10-20% will be bad after only a few uses. Then I'd say about 50-70% will fail if used heavily (daily for a month or two).
If used long enough, they will of course all fail. Expect a disk's lifetime to be maybe 6-12 months (a few reads/writes per day). I'm talking Sony, 3M, Immitation, etc. If you buy cheap disks (the colored ones that sell for about $0.10 each), expect about half to go bad right off the bat...I've had really bad luck with them jamming in drives, very annoying.
Those numbers might seem bad, but I think they're fairly accurate. I have some "older" users who learned to use computers "the floppy way", and over the course of about a year I was throwing out corrupted floppies on a weekly basis it seemed. They would always kind of half blame me....like, "back in 1985 I didn't have these problems, it must be your fault, computer guy!" But finally people started coming around.....they now appreciate that fancy little server with the big hard drives and the tape backup...even my "old" boss who prints email and thinks fax machines are the shit stopped using floppies!
Long story short, good luck. If anyone swears by a particular brand of floppy as being reliable, I hope they will help you out in this thread!
Slackmaster 2000
I believe...if I can remember this far back...
...that double density disks were the 720Kb variety, while "High Density" were 1.44MB. Now you can format a 1.44MB "high density" as a "double density" 720Kb, but you can't format a 720Kb disk to be a 1.44 (duh). So if you REQUIRE double density, you should be ok buying high density. If you need help formatting disks just ask.Anyway, good luck finding reliable floppies. They're just not wanted anymore. People use floppies for boot disks and maybe a little bit of file mobility but that's it. Realizing this, manufacturers are slacking big time.
I would say that given a box of any brand of relatively decent floppies, about 10-20% will be bad after only a few uses. Then I'd say about 50-70% will fail if used heavily (daily for a month or two).
If used long enough, they will of course all fail. Expect a disk's lifetime to be maybe 6-12 months (a few reads/writes per day). I'm talking Sony, 3M, Immitation, etc. If you buy cheap disks (the colored ones that sell for about $0.10 each), expect about half to go bad right off the bat...I've had really bad luck with them jamming in drives, very annoying.
Those numbers might seem bad, but I think they're fairly accurate. I have some "older" users who learned to use computers "the floppy way", and over the course of about a year I was throwing out corrupted floppies on a weekly basis it seemed. They would always kind of half blame me....like, "back in 1985 I didn't have these problems, it must be your fault, computer guy!" But finally people started coming around.....they now appreciate that fancy little server with the big hard drives and the tape backup...even my "old" boss who prints email and thinks fax machines are the shit stopped using floppies!
Long story short, good luck. If anyone swears by a particular brand of floppy as being reliable, I hope they will help you out in this thread!
Slackmaster 2000