brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes) (11/03/87)
I've acquired a lot of experience with floppy diskettes on the UNIXpc, what with distributing Gnu Emacs and all, and that experience says: when buying floppy diskettes to use on a UNIXpc, make *sure* you get disks with hub rings. Why? I'm not sure. But each time I've had trouble formatting a floppy or encountered data transfer errors, I've checked the diskette and found, almost without exception, that it lacked hub rings. The errors that get logged to /usr/adm/unix.log look like: FDERR ST:8 TR:4 SR:7 DR:6C DMACNT:FFFF DCRREG:F0 MCRREG:9900 Even worse, I've sometimes been able to "successfully" format such a floppy and "successfully" copy a cpio archive to it, only to discover later that the data cannot be retrieved (cpio errors like: "I/O error reading header; aborting"). 'Nuff said, the evidence speaks for itself. -- Brant Cheikes University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science ARPA: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, UUCP: ...drexel!manta!brant
jr@amanue.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) (11/04/87)
My favorite brand of floppies is Maxell. I've gone the bulk floppy route, with
mixed success. Not too long ago I found an outfit that sells Maxells in bulk.
This is just about the best of all possible worlds. They do require that you
buy 200 at a gulp, but then that hard disk will eat floppies, oh so many
floppies ... It will ruin your whole day to be depending on a backup and
then find a bad sector when you are restoring, even though cpio -it worked
fine when you made the backup!
The outfit I buy from is:
Princeton Diskette
800-426-0247
415 Central Blvd., Brick, NJ 08724
The price seems to vary depending on what kind of deal they themselves have
been able to make; I think the last time I bought some they cost me something
like $.64 a piece. There are cheaper prices than that on bulk floppies, but
I sure haven't seen cheaper prices on a brand you could hang your hat on.
Disclaimer: I have no connection with Princeton Diskette, and am only a
happy customer. I've used these diskettes on some mighty fussy QD machines,
like Altos 586 and 2086, with no problems whatever, even though they aren't
listed as QD. If you need floppies in quantity, check 'em out.
--
Jim Rosenberg
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