| Brian,
From my personal experience, so long as you store your floppies in a disk box, to
keep dust off them, and try to make sure the drive doesn't get too much dust in
it - ie. cover the thing when not in use - all this stuff about cleaning your
drive once a week is a story put about by the people who make cleaning kits.
The only time I ever had a read failure was with a dodgy floppy from ST Format -
not their fault, just a bad floppy.
I've had a look at the heads on the drive which came with my ST (in 1987 I think)
and the heads are fine.
If you don't 'take precautions' however, it might be a good idea to give the
drive a clean every now & then. I'd suggest a 'good quality' head cleaner - since
the cheap ones can have some odd-looking 'bits' hanging off the surface (well
that's what I found).
Tony
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It all depends on how much dust is in your environment and whether or
not it gets into the drive. On my mega-4, there is a cooling fan. That seems to
draw dust into the box, so I clean any dusty surface more often. This will
eventually extend to the drive innards. On my PCs this happens more often
since the fan is bigger and it draws air through the floppy doors. "Often"
is really "as needed", but that turns out to be something like every 6-9 months.
It's like cleaning any other magnetic media recorder/player, except that there is
(hopefully) less direct contact with the media from the heads. Dust is the big
problem. Dust and lint getting into the head assembly will eventually cause
the appearance of a drive failure. It also gums up the mechanisms.
I usually use a long swab (can be found at places like Radio Shack) and some
isopropyl (not too much). I have used those floppy-shaped cleaner kits,
but I have so many magnetic media recorders and players that I just basically
use the same procedure for everything (except the VCR, that has its own cleaner
kit ;^) )
fwiw,
/pjh
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