I am a big floppy disk hater. I have boxes and boxes of specialized boot
disks and they get extensive usage and the darn things go bad all the time.
Hate em.
I couldn't concur more, yet more than two decades ago, I used nothing but
floppies for years - with far less problems.
I think it's a combination of some poor choices.
1) Preformatted floppies: were a bad thing way back when someone first came
up with the idea, and still are.
Minor differences in head alignment cause more errors than you'd have with
a floppy that's formatted in the same drive you're using it in.
Besides that, I strongly suspect that preformatted floppies are formatted
with speed and cost as primary objectives, not signal quality.
2) NT/W2k/XP choosing NOT to reformat a floppy when you tell them to.
If the disk was previously formatted and track 0 is still readable, they
just do a surface scan and mark bad sectors bad.
3) Drive manufacturers using a lot more plastic and making metal parts less
sturdy than they did 15 years ago, resulting in head alignment going off
specs much sooner. If you can still find one, just compare the weight of a
drive from the IBM PC era (or older) to one you buy today.
So what I usually do, before using a floppy: bulk erase it, reformat it,
and [try to] write to it *only* in the drive that was used to format it.
That is, as far as I still use them. This machine I'm on now doesn't even
have a floppy drive anymore. I've started hating the things.
