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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

BusinessInsider, October 2021, "The Japanese government is still trying to phase out floppy disks a decade after Sony stopped making them"

https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...

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> The disks "almost never broke and lost data," Yoichi Ono, who is in charge of managing public funds for Meguro ward, told the Nikkei.

This was not my experience.

Mine either. Even putting aside media decay there is the mechanical failure (for 3.5"). For mechanical issues I was the go-to resource among friends and family, and when I worked at my Uni's help desk. I'd open them up and put the spring back together, or if need be take apart the drive to remove stuck disk, canabalize a blank disk-- toss out the media, keep the mechanical bits to slot in the old media.

Unfortunately stuck disks were often corrupted if mechanical failure occured during r/w. Sometimes I was still able to use recovery software to get data off, but plenty of times it was gone.

My understanding is that quality varied a lot, and that near the end (when USB thumbdrives were starting to take off) manufacturers started cutting a lot of corners, with the result that everyone remembers floppies as being more unreliable than they actually were, or at least could be.

Nor mine. I distinctly remember back to college circa 2000, copying a project from my computer in the dorms, walking to a project partner's dorm room adjacent to mine, and in that 15 second walk, having the data corrupted.

Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed like if I walked near them, they'd get corrupted.

I had a lot of issues with corrupted ZIP disks back in those days. They were far more reliable than floppies but far less reliable than hard drives. It got so bad I gave up using them for long term backups and switched to tape for that, relegating ZIP to quick (for the time) transfers between computers and always checking file integrity after every move.

USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data shifting.

Zip drives and cartridges were infamously unreliable, like literally every product iomega ever made. The old Bernoulli cartridges would fail all the time, too.

They were so incompetent, they didn't make the slot in the case of Jazz drives big enough to accommodate for thermal expansion of the cartridge. On top of that, the eject transport had weak cheap plastic parts that would be destroyed if the cartridge couldn't move. Result: if you used your Jazz drive for copying a bunch of data and then tried to eject it without letting the cartridge cool down first, the drive would make a very expensive snap noise and not only did you have a broken drive, you had a stuck cartridge and no way to read the cartridge even inside the drive it was stuck in.

Iomega seemed to only be good at making a product just barely good enough that people couldn't successfully sue them.

Likely the floppy was ejected too soon and/or had a corrupted filesystem. Or one of you had a floppy drive that needed to be cleaned, or was slightly out of spec and couldn't be read by the other.

I guess I was lucky. Our pile of Castle Wolfenstein/Doom/Infocom disks made it all around the neighborhood with nary a flipped bit.

Disks varied in quality. Some failed days after purchase. Some had a mishap. Some just plain degraded. Others... still work.

I've never had to do more surgery on my storage media to recover data than I did on floppy disks.

I always had the bad luck that 1 outta 10 ejects would tear the metal shield off.

Around 1992 or so I was working at a large manufacturer that was still working to eliminate punch cards. Don't underestimate how long a technology can stay in use in organizations where technology is not the main business line.

Lot of these companies claim that implementing a modern system would cost too much.

They just haven't figured out opportunity cost due to poor capabilities, or how much lost productivity there is because of the old system.

They should migrate to minidiscs :D

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