Linux Kernel's Floppy Disk Code Is Seeing Improvements In 2020

[Adarion]

I never had the pleasure to deal with 8 inch floppies (the true floppy, 5.25 was already called mini-floppy as I found out much later). But I grew up with cartridges w. ROMs, cassettes, 5.25 and 3.5 diskettes, and I still do have a lot of love for them, even with their shortcomings. It was an entirely different time then, life was different, and people with computers were real nerds.
I'd not be certain so subscribe that 3.5" ones were all bad - I still have some which work after... 20(?) years, but yes, some would break from one day to the next. And I also remember saving the same files 2x on a floppy and again on a secondary floppy, just even for a transport from university home.
It's nasty that one can hardly get any good floppy (+controller!) on the market, let aside maybe something like Kryoflux.

[zyxxel]

I never had the pleasure to deal with 8 inch floppies (the true floppy, 5.25 was already called mini-floppy as I found out much later). But I grew up with cartridges w. ROMs, cassettes, 5.25 and 3.5 diskettes, and I still do have a lot of love for them, even with their shortcomings. It was an entirely different time then, life was different, and people with computers were real nerds.
I'd not be certain so subscribe that 3.5" ones were all bad - I still have some which work after... 20(?) years, but yes, some would break from one day to the next. And I also remember saving the same files 2x on a floppy and again on a secondary floppy, just even for a transport from university home.
It's nasty that one can hardly get any good floppy (+controller!) on the market, let aside maybe something like Kryoflux.

I think one problem was that they went for a bit too high track density on 3.5" diskettes and that lots of the drives just couldn't align well enough. So a diskette written on one drive did not smoothly transferred to a different drive. This means that people who only used 3.5" diskettes for backup of their only computer fared much better than people who had to use the 3.5" format for moving data between home and work or similar. Hard disks and optical disks needs a control loop where the head is dynamically controlled to align on top of the tracks, but the old diskette stations just had a stepper motor that ticked x steps from the end point.

[cb88]

This magnetic stuff is so obsolete. I prefer my floppy disks to be optical and shiny.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM

DVD-RAM.... OBSOLETE!!!!!
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...ical_disc.html

[cb88]

I think one problem was that they went for a bit too high track density on 3.5" diskettes and that lots of the drives just couldn't align well enough. So a diskette written on one drive did not smoothly transferred to a different drive. This means that people who only used 3.5" diskettes for backup of their only computer fared much better than people who had to use the 3.5" format for moving data between home and work or similar. Hard disks and optical disks needs a control loop where the head is dynamically controlled to align on top of the tracks, but the old diskette stations just had a stepper motor that ticked x steps from the end point.

Also people would store thier floppies next to their CRT montor (I know we did when I was a kid).... and every time you turn your monitor on they get degaussed just a bit...

[M@GOid]

DVD-RAM.... OBSOLETE!!!!!
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...ical_disc.html

Another format I wasn't aware of. Unfortunately it is aimed at the archival segment, so it is a bit out of most people reach.

Basically is a cartridge with 11 Blu-ray disks, with up to 3.3 TB of capacity. They will release a 5.5 TB this year.

[zyxxel]

Another format I wasn't aware of. Unfortunately it is aimed at the archival segment, so it is a bit out of most people reach.

Basically is a cartridge with 11 Blu-ray disks, with up to 3.3 TB of capacity. They will release a 5.5 TB this year.

The disks are nice. But the price of the drive isn't. I think some "Maker" work with 3D printer etc (or repurpose an old rotary CD changer) with naked disks and a more normal BD writer is the only practical way to not bust the bank.

If we don't need 50+ years retention in a single media generation we can get quite far with a redundant file system where the data is pooled over multiple drives - obviously the drives needs to be replaced every x years but the media price for disks are acceptable until we start to aim for 100+ TB of data.

[skeetre]

You can mount flash drives as read-only. But even then, you said "transferring data from one network to another". Unless these networks are isolated from each other, why not just use the network to transfer files?

We can't use flash drives, even as read only. And from one network to another means they're 2 separate networks, or obviously I'd transfer the files over the network.

And yeah, I've had zip disks get corrupted, but still, when they came out, they were awesome. And cheaper than Jazz drives. I tried about 5 zip disks a few months back and I think 3 were readable, 1 was somewhat readable, and the 5th was a lost cause.