Sony or Teac?

[Gurck]

As always, I'll suggest avoiding Sony anything.

 

[zerocool84]

wuts a floppy?????? lol but cmon im sure nowasays the regular OEM floppy's should be just as good as the regular one's. i wonder if there is even any difference any more. this is the first build that i havent used a floppy and i know i will never need one again

 

[VirtualLarry]

Personal opinions:
Quietest/longest-lasting: NEC (I have one that makes *no* stepper noise, makes me wonder if it doesn't even use a stepper..)
Most well-known brand-name: TEAC (although I have no idea if they still live up to their reputation, these days.)
Brands to avoid: Chinon, Mitsumi (cheap, what can I say. Chinon I owned, was noisy as heck)
Sony fanboy brand: Sony (of course. Why would a Sony fanboy buy anything else? As far as floppies go, they arn't low-end, but not really high-end either. They fail too.)
Overclockers fav: Citizen (No joke. I had someone ask me if I had any Citizen-brand floppies specifically. I had to drag it out of him why, because I was a bit curious myself. Turns out, there's a hack to enable 4x speed mode on those things. Apparently they are popular to hack and put into high-speed floppy duplicator machines, on the cheap. So apparently, you CAN overclock floppy drives. Who would have thought??)

As far as USB floppies go, I've only really used some Y-E data 2x-speed USB1.1 drives, that were salvaged from old iMacs or something, but they seemed to work well, were fairly quiet, and were indeed 2x speed. You have no idea how much that speed "feels" different, when working with floppies. It was like it was a new drive type altogether, almost. I hear that there are also 4x speed USB floppies on the market too. Could be a real convenient time-saver.

There are also Alps, Mitsubishi, Y-E Data (non-USB ones, IBM uses them for their FRUs oftentimes), Matsushita (Panasonic), and some others. I don't have a lot of experience with any of those brands, although Alps is known as a high-quality keyboard mfg as well.

But to the vast majority, a floppy is a floppy. Suggestion is to just avoid Chinon/Mitsumi, if you care about quality/longevity at all, but Mitsumi is probably the largest current producer of floppy drives these days, because no-one wants to pay any real money for one. (I'd buy another one of these NEC drives for $30, if I could find one. It's the most amazingly-quiet floppy that I've ever encountered. I think that it was a laptop design, repurposed for the desktop, because it's thinner than a normal drive too, glued to a normal-height bezel.)