[controversial97]

Until about the year 1993, 3.5" disks were very reliable if you didn't abuse them.

Around the early days of windows 3.11, someone figured out how to make cheaper 3.5" disks and putting data on off-brand disks became a gamble.

Enticed by the low price, I bought several boxes of ten floppy disks that had plastic shutters instead of metal. A few from each box of ten had bad sectors from new.

I end up trying to only use TDK disks, though later in the 1990s it seemed to me that the quality of new 3.5" floppy drives went down as well.

[greenbit]

There were those double high density disks that never quite caught on, but one fun thing was having the double hd drive (2.8M) and doing anything that would write to an existing 'regular' (1.4M) floppy -- the drive would write narrower tracks than the existing data, and then when you went to read that sector back, the head would pick up both the new narrow track and the adjacent remainder of the wider track, hilarity ensuing. This led to a certain amount of cursing cheap floppies that weren't really to blame.

[cyberax]

For some reason, 5.25" floppies always never failed me. But 3.5" floppies had always been a source of problems.

[bobim]

And in the meantime we were drilling cheap 720k floppies. Strangely never had an issue with these.

[Plasmoid]

I remember I bought a box of floppies in the early 2000s. From that box, I don't think I got a single disk that had zero bad sectors. At that point, I moved to thumb drives, CD-R's, or email for my data transfer needs.

[nickt]

That’s exactly my experience. I have plenty of (mostly TDK) floppies from the late 80’s that have my, ahem, backup copies of Amiga games and the vast majority of them just keep on working. Many of the cheaper ones I used after I graduated in ‘94 don’t work.

[roblatham]

that sounds right to me.. worked universit help desk in the late 90s. wow, the number of distressed people who kept their only copy of their thesis on this one floppy drive that no longer works. some harsh lessons in backups ...