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by jzdziarski 1391 days ago
Literally read this while loading an old Famicom disk game into a Nintendo disk drive. Thirty years and it not only still works, it was more capable by its design. Nothing wrong with magnetic media, but good luck on your modernization effort.
3 comments
klodolph 1391 days ago
Floppy disks are not manufactured today. Maybe there is nothing “wrong with magnetic media”, but there is definitely something fishy about running your business on equipment that can only be replaced with used stock & the various supplies of NOS floppies.

Floppy disks are also extremely difficult to repair, and realigning a misaligned head requires equipment and media that is difficult to find and expensive to acquire. If you never had to adjust the head on a floppy disk—well, let me tell you—you have to get a special floppy disk to realign it and use an oscilloscope to read the signal test pattern from the special disk while you realign it.

“Not manufactured for over a decade” and “requires specialized equipment and training to repair” is a bad combination.

To be clear, there are a lot of scenarios where floppies make sense today. You may have an old CNC machine or an old chemical sample analyzer that takes floppies, and it may cost five or six figures to upgrade.

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askvictor 1391 days ago
The thing that's wrong with magnetic media (specifically the floppy disc and audio tape) is that the head is in contact with the medium, which slowly wears it out. It only has a certain number of uses before it dies (also, the plastics will probably disintegrate at some point). Hard disks are much more reliable for longevity. Not sure about flash (or backup tapes - I assume they've been designed with longevity in mind)...
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bin_bash 1391 days ago
Nothing wrong with 1.4mb of storage?
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shakna 1391 days ago
The ATtiny85 is still an incredibly popular little chip in manufacturing. It comes with a grand total of 8KiB flash memory.

So, no. There's not much wrong with 1.4MiB of storage - depending on the purpose you're using it for.

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out_of_protocol 1391 days ago
1.4MB is okay, not being able to reliably read it is not okay
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