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  • From: Hal MacArgle <halinux AT kvinet.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] Floppymeter Fun.
  • Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 09:05:45 -0400

Greetings: Sindi asked that I forward this:


Floppymeter fun (another new posting).

We tested out about 20 floppy drives. Two which don't format a known good
disk without finding imaginary bad spots were spinning too slowly and had
deviations of about +1500 ppm on capacity. So did one which makes disks
that other computers cannot read. We recycled those and a couple with
very high negative deviations on capacity (they spun too fast). The very
worst drive was about -4600 ppm deviation on rotation time (spun at
199,100 instead of 200,000). Unfortunately that is the one in our 486
laptop which we don't have a replacement for. It will read disks that it
formatted but not disks formatted elsewhere so to test it first we had to
format two disks, copy BL2 to them, then floppymeter (on disk 2). Would
not run off the original disks. What makes drives run too fast?

If they spin too fast but transfer data too slowly the problems cancel
out, as the capacity deviation ppm equals time per rotation added to data
transfer rate. Most drives spun too fast and transferred a bit slowly or
a bit fast. All bad drive were way off on spin speed.

One drive was very noisy and spun very slowly. One did not work at all.
We now have 8 fewer floppy drives.

The best drives had deviations under 1000 ppm. TEAC (TUV, Mitsumi) was
consistently excellent (under 500 ppm, in one case only 70) with one
exception, and we have about 10 of them. Toshiba was bad both times and
the front covers were also loose or missing. Packard Bell was sloppy,
rotation speed kept changing. IBM/ALPS - one good, one rotten. Same for
Panasonic.

We have about 10 360K drives which have never had any problems. My first
360K needed cleaning after about 5 years heavy use on a computer with no
hard drive. I hear that they could also be realigned.

End of forward:



  • [BL] Floppymeter Fun., Hal MacArgle, 08/25/2004

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