Bulk Erase 8" floppies

From: Nico de Jong <nico_at_farumdata.dk>
Date: Wed Sep 17 02:03:00 2003

> >A hint : sort the floppies according to density. I would be rather p.....
> >if I bought a stack of 20 floppies, believing they were DSDD, and I got
> >some SSSD ones.
>
> Is there a way to tell visually if they are DS vs SS? Not all the
> floppies have their original factory labels on them any more, and I know
> there are some of each.

I just checked some of mine, and there is not really "conclusive evidence". On top of that, some SSSD floppies were rejected DSDD's. The good thing is, that I've never seen a double sided that couldnt be used as single sided. The story behind this is rather remarkable: when we talk about 3740 floppies (i.e. IBM labelled), the f?rst track is always written as single-side single-density, as some drives and/or systems can detect the disk format and/or re-assign defective tracks. So, selling "unknowns" as SSSD should be safe, and if they get a DSSD or DSDD (yes, they exist!), they were just lucky.

Nico
Received on Wed Sep 17 2003 - 02:03:00 BST