If you have weird legacy hardware that needs floppy disks, I wouldn’t buy new media. In my experience most disks made after the mid-late 90s are unreliable and won’t last more than a couple formats before developing bad sectors. I’m not sure why this is, maybe the disk factories stopped maintaining their machinery when sales stopped growing. New old stock disks from the early-mid 90s are definitely the way to go IMO.
I can't comment about the new disks, but I'm surprised you can vouch for the 90s. They are magnetic support after all and I'd expect that to degrade rather faster than in a few decades, maybe less the plastic but more the magnetic medium...
Other than retro-computing, what are the more interesting usage of them?
Some I can imagine:
- Write a floppy disk driver and use them for testing
- Research ways to encrypt critical data (for single person, the most critical data probably can be fitted into one 1.44MB floppy)
- Anything else?
> Then, add the time back to you via USPS first class mail. Not fast enough? We offer expedited and download service at an additional cost. [1]
Additional cost to sync a file in Dropbox. Apparently, it's a lot harder than mailing a USB drive. But hey, they sell floppies, what was I expecting!..
I wish I would have known about this a year or so ago. I was cleaning out my fathers stuff and tossed dozens of floppy’s for lack of a better way to handle them.
Hopefully this doesn't sound too mean, but "lack of a better way to handle them"? I went on Amazon and searched "floppy reader" and had dozens of hits of external USB floppy readers in the $10-$20 price range (and could probably find one even cheaper if I spent more than 30 seconds looking).
Was there something special about these floppies that made them difficult to handle?
I wonder if floppy disk drives nowadays can just read once at insertion and cache the puny 1.38MB in memory. And have some battery backup to write if the power goes out during unmount procedure (The floppy drives on Macintosh didn't have the eject button and you had to drag the diskette to the trash to unmount it).
Them being a large bulk of plastic? I don't think the OP was concerned about the contents but of throwing out a bunch of plastic that could have been valuable.
