floppy problems on RS/6000 320

[Scott Hudson]

I have consistently had problems with the 1.44MB floppy drive on my RS/6000 model 320, and I'd be interested in hearing (by e-mail) from anyone who has had a similar experience.

I've been using Sony MFD-2HD disks.  They'll format fine, I'll tar data onto them, be able to read the data back a few times, but about 10-20% of the disks will eventually give me an I/O error. At that point attempting to format the disk gives me a "diskette bad or incompatible" error, and the disk appears to have been trashed because it won't format on other RS/6000s or PCs either.  This has happened with disks from 4 different boxes.

My IBM rep says that this failure rate is not unusual for high-density diskettes, but that I have a hard time believing that.

Thanks for any help,

Scott Hudson (hudson at eecs.wsu.edu)