Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium. I was quite disappointed when I discovered many of my writable CD's started failing at the 15 to 20 year mark.
Last I checked (Covid) about 2/3rd of my 5"1/4 Commodore 64 floppy disks were still working (they had to be about 35 y/o when I tried in 2020). But the ones working won't last much longer.
Right?
Also, the whole point of DVD-RWs was to replace stuff like floppies or Zip disks when you are sneakernetting things around. The same way you use uSD or thumb drives these days. They were never meant for long term archiving, if you were doing that you would use DVD-R or DVD+Rs instead.
Basically about the life time of SSD's (20 years) , CD's (10-40 years) , Floppy disc/magnetic tapes (5-50 years), vinyl records (30-120 years), books (high/low acid paper)(50-500 years), clay tablets (centuries/millennia) and eventually spoken word (tens/hundreds of millennia). Seeing as how much of the internet has gone dark both through lack of economic incentive or accidental erasure - it was not the most cheery conclusion. About how the more efficient we get with information storage, the more brittle it becomes. But also the longer information can last, the more it is liable to be changed with time. Think like the game of telephone.
The big lesson take away I made from it all was that, it isn't so much the medium but the information. If it is useful or cherished, it will live far beyond its original medium. Knowledge of hygiene will live a lot longer than season 3 of Survivor on DVD. Video games are cherished and many are living way beyond their original medium. We will loose 99.99% of all data produced over the last few decades but that it mostly stuff that nobody had any need or desire to keep - and that is totally fine. It is basically a natural filter for quality, and while we may be concerned about what we may loose, ultimately a quality statement will be made. Information about the taxation system of 1956 will not last as long as the I Ching which has already gone millennia.
And yet there are also a lot of audio CD's from the 80's that are holding on. A big part of it would be the manufacturing quality and how in the name of efficiency and lower prices, some corner may have been cut.
That said, if you just like the sound of vinyl and feeling of handling them then good for you and I'm not trying to rain on your parade.
For the 3,5" drives I simply used a USB version which are available aplenty.
For the 5 1/4" I needed to use a Greaseweazle ( https://sordan.ie/product/1527/newest-greaseweazle-v41-usb-f... ) as there are no USB versions available. The drive I have is a good quality HD drive though (1,2MB) so it should be able to read 360kB disks with no issue.
The floppy disk lifetime was, as always, an estimate. My 5 1/4 disks for C64 seem to be the way more robust product compared with the 3 1/2 for Amiga and later PC. Maybe information density plays a role here.
CDs have the reflection layer problem, not the information loss per se. That's the main difference between disks and CDs.
And notably HD were terrible at being used as DD, as is generally the case with Amiga floppies.
With the advent of Amiga hard disk I didn’t need that much disks anymore. I bought mine - 50mb! - at the World of Commodore 1991 I think.
The images in the posted article are from other sources.
[1] https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/4life_expectancy