I have been quite upset to discover first hand, how sloppy the quality
control for floppy disk production has become, even within Brand companies,
in the age of 10 gig hard disks, RW cds, zip drives, and DVDs.
I read an industry report a couple of years ago that estimated a 30%
defect rate in newly produced floppies. I have had, recently made
floppies become unreadable on me within hours on various occasions.
If I want to be sure, I now must run scandisk or similar on a floppy before
putting some data on it I want to last till I get home. With some frequency,
scandisk's physical scan finds bad clusters on a new, just formatted floppy.
In contrast, floppies I bought many years ago continue to be a reliable
as a rock. I have found some kinds of 3M floppies, recently made more
trustworthy than others.
I suspect the computer industry regards floppies as a relec of past history
and just does not care anymore. Pundits have been speculating for years
what the replacement would be -- would it be zip drives, super floppies,
RW cds, etc?
Given the change in size and scale that winblows has created, a Megabyte of
data is probably thought of as equivalent to 1K of data, in the days of
old -- way to tiny to store much of any value these days.
It is historically interesting that one can is hard put to buy a 150 or
250Megabyte tape ``backup'' drive anymore, but manufactures still feel
impelled to include a 1 1/4 Meg floppy drive with PCs who hard drives
average 8 Gigs.
Howard Schwartz
-------------------------------
theo "at" ncal.verio.com
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