Technical > PC Hardware Discussion/Reviews > What happend to 2.88MB Floppy Disk's

For a while there it seemed that they made 2.88MB Floppy Drives yet stopped and went back to 1.44MB Floppy Disks. 2.88MB Floppy's hold twice as much data as a 1.44MB Floppy. Why didn't the 2.88MB Floppy's replace the 1.44MB Floppy's??? My dad had a 2.88MB Floppy Drive and yet he could never find any 2.88MB Floppy Disks but 1.44MB Floppy Disks only. Did they even make any 2.88MB Floppy Disks at all to go along with the 2.88MB Floppy Drive???

Unfortunately, flash is NOT acceptable as backup for applications requiring permanently unmodifiable "true" copies of data.

I still have my ZIP drives... and disks. I remember they also suffered from a thing called "The Click Of Death". Thankfully neither of my units were affected.
I had the external parallel port version which still works to this day... along with an internal drive. The last operating system that supported these pieces of hardware natively, was Windows XP 64-bit Edition. I retired them after Vista and onwards. I could not get the external version to work in any later OS.

I believe ZIP at some point contributed to the 2.88 demise.

No, Bournoulli came before Zip drives and there was another product I used to come across quite often that was external SCSI and I cant recall its name. It was popular on workstations (before Jaz came along).

Right! And they released the notorious Sparq! If you owned a Sparq and had a few cartridges that worked, you should never, ever buy another cartridge or use someone else's as there were many bad disks that would break drives and the company was terrible for replacing them under warranty. Basically you buy the drive, buy 5 cartridges, cross your fingers and if they all work and the drive continues to work, that's it, use that combination forever.

And that's the reason why I haven't got rid of my ZIP drive which happened to be in the once awesome Gateway 2000 Pentium II 300mhz, circa 2007.

You clearly did not understand what I was talking about. *Permanently unmodifiable* does not have anything do with longevity of the medium.

"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke says. "There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more."

The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam.

"Many of the cheap burnable CDs available at discount stores have a life span of around two years," Gerecke says. "Some of the better-quality discs offer a longer life span, of a maximum of five years."

Distinguishing high-quality burnable CDs from low-quality discs is difficult, he says, because few vendors use life span as a selling point.

DVD-R or DVD-RAM discs work well for storing large files such as movies and backup files. Unlike rewritable DVD discs, DVD-R discs typically are suitable for burning information a single time. However, you may be able to delete items from a DVD-R disc, if necessary. Check the product specifications supplied with the disc before performing these steps to determine if erasing files will render the disc unusable.

Read more: How to Erase a DVD-R Disc | eHow.com »www.ehow.com/how_7271603_erase-d···FKB0RFi4

I had my internal SyQuest SparQ drive replaced once under warranty which I recall being fairly easy. I only bought about 3 cartridges.

Were you referring to warranty replacements of the SparQ drive or the cartridges?

When I searched, burned DVD's may have a readable life of between 2-5 years depending on the products used and storage.

I've never trusted optical media for long-term storage.

There's something new (to me, at least) that promises long life in an optical disk.

M-DISK

Just give up.