[Coco] Brands Of Old Diskettes

[Steve Ostrom]

I'm sort of a packrat.  OK, I have an obsession with old Coco software.  I tend to buy original software in my feeble attempt to have just about every software package ever put out for the Coco.  It's a fun hobby, and I'm running out of room.  I also like to purchase eBay offerings of old Coco backup software as well.  I probably have well over 2000 "backup" diskettes now.  Almost all of these original and backup diskettes have been transferred to my Cloud-9 hard drive system.  I'm currently working on hard drive cartridge #24 for my software backups, each cartridge holding the equivalent of 256 Coco diskettes.

Now, to get to my main reason for writing this e-mail.  These diskettes of backup software have many different manufacturers.  Most are blank generics.  Some are name-brand.  After roughly 25 years of storage, more than 98% of these diskettes are still in excellent condition, with all the software still readable.  Once in awhile I'll get an I/O error, but many of these will eventually read since the I/O error is often dust particles or bug poop.  They seem to clear themselves after a few tries with backup.  The one brand of diskette that consistantly causes problems is Memorex.  Given the amount of advertising that Memorex did back in the 80's for diskettes and audio tape, I would have guessed these would be among the best brands.  What I've noticed is the magnetic coating appears to be flaking off the surface.  Placing one of these bad diskettes in the drive will cause the drive to sound like there is a piece of sandpaper stuck in there.  The diskette is usually totally unreadable, and I will need to clean my drive heads after trying to read one of these bad disks.  Also, not only are Memorex diskettes the worst brand, but most of the Memorex disks I try are bad.

-- Steve --