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I'm always surprised when people talk about the unreliability of floppies. I still have my stash of Atari ST games from the early 90s and play them on a real machine regularly and I haven't had a single failure. Perhaps the lower density of 720k floppies makes them less prone to corruption, or perhaps I've just been lucky and stored them well.

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1.44M floppies are easily the worst of the common formats when it comes to reliability. Even back when you bought them new in stores they were bad, and now they are very bad.

Double-density 3,5" media like the disks for your ST are much better, and both 360K and 1.2M 5,25" types have proven quite resilient in comparison. I play a lot with retro computers in my spare time and anecdotally I find that a random 5,25" 360K disk from 1985 is much more likely to be readable than a 1.44M one from 1995.

1.44MB floppies wernt particularly bad in design, but many people remeber them from the tail end of the format, where reputable brands left the market and only the crap was left over, and floppies from that era truely did suck.

Late 90s floppies and drives were definitely not as good as early 90s and 80s floppies.

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