If You Own Floppies Like This You May Be Entitled To Compensation
A joke, but I honestly think there might be something to it. Back in 2001 or so, I was still using floppies regularly, and suddenly, they began failing. I suspect this is because manufacturers began using much worse processes, but possibly because everyone stopped making them except for one company who started rebranding them for everybody else. I have no proof of this but it seems really likely.
It's easy to think of floppies as pretty fragile things, but the truth is, I've seen filthy 3.5in discs from literally the beginning of the technology, 1983, that still worked. In fact, I generally assume any given floppy will work, unless it looks visibly dirty inside, or there's mold evident on the media, because I have had excellent success rates across the board, no matter where they came from.
It used to be a very normal thing to have one single disk that you would, for instance, carry your docs to and from school on - This is literally one of the things I was doing, for the two college courses I ever took, and I never had a problem. And then, one day, I got some new discs in clear colored cases, very iMac themed, and they lasted perhaps a week or two and then stopped reading.
And then suddenly, every single disk I got was doing this - failing within weeks. They had been fine before, and disks I got before the 2000s worked fine - they still do, in fact. I have some of them, going back to 1993, and almost every single one works perfectly.
The ones above I got new in box, with the plastic still on em. That was maybe a couple months ago, and they've already started failing. I almost threw out two motherboards, including one rare model that I really did not want to get rid of, because I thought they had spontaneously died - in reality it was just that the dos boot disk I had been relying on for the last few weeks just up and quit working.
I grabbed another one out of the box, wrote a boot image to it, tried to boot from it, immediately got errors. Switched to some discs that were old enough to not have a URL on the box, and sure enough, they work perfectly.
In conclusion, there are plenty of disks still around made before 2000. don't make trouble for yourself, just throw out the newer ones.
Here's a quote form the interview regarding this:
[Interviewer] 30% sounds like a pretty high fail rate. Can you tell us something about the quality difference in certain disks? Which type of floppy is the best and which is the worst to recycle?
[Tom Persky] In the early years, the manufacturing process for floppy disks was pretty bad. In the middle years, when they made billions and billions of disks, the manufacturing process was great. At the end of the life of the medium, the manufacturing process regressed. I would say that the best disks are the ones made between 1985 and 2000. If they were stored at a decent temperature, they’re as good today as they ever were. There’s stuff that was made in the last couple of runs that I bought from China and half of them were bad. When you think about a manufacturing process that’s getting to the end of its life, you have to consider that the testing equipment falls out of calibration. You would have to hire somebody to come in and fix it, but you just can’t afford to tool or replace anything. Even though you might lose 30% of your output, you’re just going to live with the 70% that you have left. In the end the quality was so bad that people didn’t even test the disks anymore. Rather, they just tried to format the disk and if it didn’t work, they knew it was bad. They started spitting out as many disks as possible to burn through the remaining stock. I guess they just wanted to get them out and be done with it.