Making a floppy disk from scratch
16 points by james
16 points by james
I wish somebody did this but at scale, with emphasis on quality.
There’s definitely a market for them. I would order a decent amount.
As far as I understand it, actually making good quality higher density floppies require extremely expensive hardware, making any floppies produced at a smaller scale very costly per unit.
As someone who made an almost working single density 5.25” floppy from scratch, I am fairly certain the costs are going to be fairly low. The magnetic material costs almost nothing, the plastic used for the base cost, well, like plastic. There are no extremely complicated processes needed for manufacturing, but the initial investment into hardware and know how could cost quite a lot.
It’s easy to make something that “almost works” :)
The expensive and complicated part is the thin film deposition of the magnetic coating. 3.5” HD floppies has a ~1.2 µm coating that needs to be pretty damn uniform. There’s a comment that goes into it on the video from someone who has experience with thin film deposition, but doing it properly needs a bunch of expensive equipment.
When I say “almost works” I mean it can be practically used at lower disk spinning speeds. And at regular speeds and formats, I had actual data in actual PC format stored on them (with noticeable but manageable loss)
I’m pretty sure there is no need to make the coating at 1.2 microns uniform for the floppy to work. The drives are far more tolerant to this than it might seem. Sure, there is a lot of difference between 5.25” at 360KB per side and 3.5” at 720KB per side, but not THAT much. And a 5.25” at 360KB with actually readable sectors was made by applying small particles of magnetic material to a low quality binder with my bare hands, with common bumps almost certainly being over 50 microns.