floppies & linux

[plug@arcticmail.com]

Yeah, to work around the floppy drive quality issue,
I installed six floppy drives in my system and use
software RAID-5 so that when one of the floppy drives
goes balls up I can simply hot-swap the failed floppy
drive and rebuild the data that were located on the
floppy diskette in the failed floppy drive.


D

* On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 08:33:53PM -0700, William Lindley wrote:
> Back when floppy drives cost $500, they had some semblance of quality.
> 
> Now that they're $11 at Fry's (that's $5 before markup, $1 before shipping 
> from Japan, and $.13 of materials) they are almost without fail ... prone 
> to fail.
> 
> You might try using brand-new formatted disks.  Be sure if you put a 
> floppy into a Windows box that you write-protect it, since Windows writes 
> on a disk even if you only do a directory!  (It's updating the "Last 
> Access Time."  Rah.)  Thus merely reading a disk on someone else's machine 
> with a misaligned drive can trash the disk.
> 
> \\/
> http://www.wlindley.com