Is there any quality difference between commercially produced floppies and floppies made on home computer?

[offensive_Jerk]

Do commercially produced floppies (let's say IBM formatted 360k disks for simplicity's sake) offer any quality advantage over if you were to just create a floppy from your own PC?

I'm not even sure what technology was used to produce software back in the day, but curious if it is any better than just writing a disk yourself.

I know there were tricks some software vendors did to try to curb piracy that you may not be able to reproduce on a normal drive.

If you burn a CD at home, it's a digital copy, so theoretically the audio/digital quality would be the same, but I'm sure the commercially produced CDs themselves are sturdier than a CD-R when it comes to reliability.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

The short answer in terms of "quality" is "no". A floppy disk from a mass duplicator uses the same media as the commercially sold box of blanks. Provisos:

• It wasn't terribly unusual for commercial software to be sold on disks that didn't have write protect notches, IE, the disk was permanently write protected.
• Some copy-protected disks did indeed to weird things, like format some sectors of the disk with indeterminate strength signals, or even physically damaged part of the disk, allowing a software routine to play games like "this area of the disk should never read the same way twice" or "if I try to write here it should never work".
  

If you're talking about whether preformatted 360K disks were somehow better than formatting your own that's a *definite* no. It's likely that your disk drive isn't going to have exactly the same track alignment, etc, as the bulk duplicator they slap the pre-format on the disk with, so the disk is probably going to be *slightly* less reliable than one you format yourself. Formatting it yourself gives you a definitive measure of if the disk can format and verify properly in *your* drive, not the duplicator.

 

[krebizfan]

I saw a Verbatim evaluation of the quality of the disks sold and their claim was that the very best disks were reserved for OEM use, followed by Datalife Plus, Datalife, plain Verbatim, and finally whatever is left is sold to others. Whether the company selling software used quality disks was another issue. The company I worked for in the early 90s used the cheapest bulk disks and suffered about a 50% failure rate in house. I was dubious as to the long term survival of those disks.

 

[Chuck(G)]

We always bought duplicator-grade disks in bulk (no fancy labels, etc.--just a couple hundred in a box. They worked well enough. Still have a couple boxes of the 5.25 and 3.5 DD ones--I think the prime supplier was Sony--I don't recall. However, some high-speed duplication equipment allowed not only for faster rotation while writing (600 and 900 RPM was not unsual), but also higher write currents as well as insertion of copy protection, cf. Formaster and Trace. Standalone units. Not your standard floppy drives.

 

[offensive_Jerk]

We always bought duplicator-grade disks in bulk (no fancy labels, etc.--just a couple hundred in a box. They worked well enough. Still have a couple boxes of the 5.25 and 3.5 DD ones--I think the prime supplier was Sony--I don't recall. However, some high-speed duplication equipment allowed not only for faster rotation while writing (600 and 900 RPM was not unsual), but also higher write currents as well as insertion of copy protection, cf. Formaster and Trace. Standalone units. Not your standard floppy drives.

Yeah this is a long the lines of what I was wondering. So the quality of the write may have been better and faster than a 'home user's' drive.

Do the higher write currents produce a more 'reliable' write to the magnetic media?

What do the duplicators look like? I assume they are 'headless' and you insert a master disk and it creates x amount of copies?
Does it read the master disk into memory and then use all the drives to write copies?

 

[krebizfan]

https://www.awp1.com/pctpro.html shows a model that requires a computer. Relatively slow and cheap. This one can store an entire disk set and keep them together saving on time sorting later.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

So the quality of the write may have been better and faster than a 'home user's' drive.

Why are you assuming it's "better"? This is just spitballing here, but it would seem that if the drives are spinning faster than the standard 300 RPM a greater write current might be necessary to achieve a comparable degree of "flip" in the media than you need at the standard RPM? Amping up the write current higher than the media is built for usually does *not* result in a more reliable format; try formatting regular double-density media in a 1.2MB drive and you'll end up with a disk that essentially self-randomizes as the Hercules-strength magnetic domains bleed out into the overly receptive coating.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I said nothing about the higher write currents resulting in more reliable media, only that they were used on high-speed drives. Here's an ad for an older Formaster:

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/formaster_large.jpg

 

[offensive_Jerk]

I didn't automatically assume, I said it 'may' be more reliable, and then asked if that was indeed the case.

But that does make sense, how data is interpreted on a floppy isn't all that much different than pits on a CD.

 

[offensive_Jerk]

I said nothing about the higher write currents resulting in more reliable media, only that they were used on high-speed drives. Here's an ad for an older Formaster:

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/formaster_large.jpg

Thanks for the link.
That sure does not look like what I thought it would.

Reminds me of a Marshall half stack.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Trace was perhaps the leader in 3.5" duplicators. There's a YT vid of one guy using one. A brief discussion of how the thing operated in general
and there apparently is still an outfit that can sell you duplicator-grade floppies: https://www.awp1.com/floppydiskettes.html

 

[Eudimorphodon]

But that does make sense, how data is interpreted on a floppy isn't all that much different than pits on a CD.

Uhm, they’re not really anything alike. At all.

Writeable CD media works on completely different principles than pressed CDs; the latter has physical pits and lands which read as dark or light to the laser, while writeable CDs use dyes or metallic compounds which are darkened or melted by the writing process. Pressed CDs are *inherently* more stable because of the nature of both the media and the marking process, there is *nothing* like this going on with mass duplicated floppy disks.

 

[Chuck(G)]

From the above duplicator supply web site, I'll note this:

Q: Why would you buy unformatted disks for use with Trace/Other Disk Duplicators?

A: Three reasons:

1.) QUALITY – 99% of the product being sold as formatted is low quality media. Disk manufacturer’s use disk certifiers to sort the disks by Grades.

Typically the lowest graded media would be formatted and put into 10 pack retail boxes and sold to end users.
These disks will work fine in a target PC but they don’t work well on a Trace High Speed Disk Duplicator because the Trace equipment measures the recorded Amplitude while duplicating. Low quality disks have low amplitude and thus many disks will fail on a Trace system with Dropout Error (Amplitude).

2.) QUALITY – Overwriting a recorded (formatted) disk results in a disk that has lower Amplitude and lower Window Margins which makes the disk harder to read. This is especially true when your Target Machine has an older drive that has dirty heads, heads that are out-of-alignment, or electrical issues.

3.) QUALITY – Trace duplicators format and write in one revolution of the disk. Therefore, there is no speed advantage to using Pre-formatted disks.

Parenthetically, I'll note that the more recent (geologically speaking) versions of the Intel floppy controller chip (82078, but not 82077) include a one-pass format-and-write command; I'm not aware of any popular software that uses the feature.