Can a 15+ year old floppy disk still work?

[Aldeb]

If a floppy disk should stay in a drawer for 15 or 20 years, and not be used, could it still work afterwards? does it make any difference if it's a factory disk (eg a driver disk) or something you yourself wrote at one time.

i'm asking because i happened to find an old driver disk and the contents cannot be read by my computer. (floppy drive is fine and working of course)

[wardrich]

Hard to say. I had an old Tandy with floppies that still worked. It was probably at least 15 years old when I was using it. With that being said, higher density disks may not fare so well. Best thing I can say is find somebody with an ancient beater and give it a try.

[486 player]

I've some 20+ y old ones and still writable.

[Aldeb]

Ok. it was just a curiosity. I wasn't sure if floppys in general expired after a long period of time or whether other factors came into play

[tienkhoanguyen]

Jesus Christ!hehe

I have some Borland discs dated all the way back to 1990 or such.

I was able to install the Borland stuffs.

It seems like Borland's old stuff.

On eBay they advertised it as vintage old stock software.

[Wally]

People still use floppy disks?

[tienkhoanguyen]

Jesus Christ!hehe

Jesus!hehe

Yes, I do.

I had to get a USB floppy drive because of my interest in Borland's stuffs.

The Borland Turbo Assembler 5.0 and MS-DOS 6.22 are all on floppies.

[pseudocoder]

People still use floppy disks?

I haven't seen any floppy discs for sale in years though I haven't looked very hard.

Ok. it was just a curiosity. I wasn't sure if floppys in general expired after a long period of time or whether other factors came into play

The answer is both; the media will degrade over time making them harder to read. Another problem is the drive that created them; if it was slightly out of spec when the disc was created, the data layout will be slightly misaligned.

As the disc ages, it becomes harder for other drives to read it... when read errors occur on the olden stuff, often, its data can only be retrieved from the drive that actually created it.

HTH

[Quadko]

There are also more extreme options like the USB 5.25 floppy archival readers:

http://www.deviceside.com/ and their FC5025
http://www.kryoflux.com/ the Kyroflux magnetic museum archiver

Hopefully a standard floppy can still read them, but those and the (now obsolete?) Catweasle are extended options I know about.

And if you need to support a floppy in a device but want to use a usb stick, you can go the other way with a floppy emulator, like the cheap gotek device or higher quality similar options.

[486 player]

People still use floppy disks?

Even Microsoft had to return the support for Win 10 'cause some companies' critical systems.

[Chilly Willy]

I have floppies from as far as the 80's still working in my Samsung drive. Bought the drive new sometime around 2004 for my XP machine.

[tienkhoanguyen]

Jesus Christ!hehe

O-well, my floppy just failed on me this week.

It should have files on it however it was demagnetized or somethiing.

I put the floppy drive and floppy on top of my air conditioner.

Then it fell to the floor.

Then I tried to read from it and it failed.

However after formatting it it worked like new again.

So I guess it works as far as being re-magnetized through formatting again.

However the data is sensitive and got lost.

I'll never know what was on that diskette.

O well starting fresh I stored my Borland practice on this formatted again.

To my sprite, I don't know everything about Borland programming hehe

Bless God, then my real mom Huong Thi Vu to be happy 100 years!

Honours to my real mom Huong Thi Vu to be healthy and happy 100 years.

Honours to my real dad Nguyen Binh Thuy to be glad 100 years.

Love to my real sister Nguyen Khoa Thi and Nguyen Khoa Thuyen.