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.






