Interesting history, which does seem to be true: In the Beginning, the reliability of floppies was really quite good. Over time, as the mass market developed, however, quality went down as people shaved pennies and fractions of pennies. Storied brands such as Sony ended up being bad sector magnets (well, you know what I mean...).
My big secret for those of us still using floppies (USB floppies are a steal!) --- get Maxell NOS; they're about $3 per diskette now, but I have beat them hard and they keep going. Of course, I also had a batch of poorly-stored floppies that would not even turn (!) from one vendor (cheap, tho...) and they almost ruined one drive.
My rule now is: once a single sector goes kaput, make a new working copy from your backup (you HAVE a backup, right???), mark the bad sector of the failed disk, and put it in the 'BAD' pile. I have not yet had a sector on a Maxell 1.44 diskette go bad. Several SONY diskettes however are in that pile.
Note that the head drags on the surface of a floppy, so you're always losing a little; what that closeness does, tho, is allow phenomenal bits-per-square-inch. The coatings are very good, binders are good, magnetic properties are excellent. And the head widths (both sides, after all) are small. So you get formatted 80 cylinders of 18,432 bytes per cylinder MSDOS-compatible capacity, at that 5 revolutions per second ( 300 RPM, but gosh, RPS is a better unit here...) speed.
The floppy drive is an incredible chunk of engineering. It's unfortunate that Zip 100 and Zip 250 arrived so relatively late in the game.
I was partial to Verbatim because those seemed to be pretty consistently good from the early 80's through the mid 90's.
Zip drives sold like absolute mad mid/late 1995.*
* In 95, I placed around the top for the high school virtual portfolio investing contest ROI with 90% in IOMG +150% (2.5x) in 2 weeks. I also happened to be selling Zip drives at my night/weekend job as fast as they came in. My high school econ teacher mentioned his investing club invested and sold it before sales took off stonks-style and so they lost money on it. These floptical/-alikes went poof as soon as CD+/-R(W) drives and discs came down in price.
My big secret for those of us still using floppies (USB floppies are a steal!) --- get Maxell NOS; they're about $3 per diskette now, but I have beat them hard and they keep going. Of course, I also had a batch of poorly-stored floppies that would not even turn (!) from one vendor (cheap, tho...) and they almost ruined one drive.
My rule now is: once a single sector goes kaput, make a new working copy from your backup (you HAVE a backup, right???), mark the bad sector of the failed disk, and put it in the 'BAD' pile. I have not yet had a sector on a Maxell 1.44 diskette go bad. Several SONY diskettes however are in that pile.
Note that the head drags on the surface of a floppy, so you're always losing a little; what that closeness does, tho, is allow phenomenal bits-per-square-inch. The coatings are very good, binders are good, magnetic properties are excellent. And the head widths (both sides, after all) are small. So you get formatted 80 cylinders of 18,432 bytes per cylinder MSDOS-compatible capacity, at that 5 revolutions per second ( 300 RPM, but gosh, RPS is a better unit here...) speed.
The floppy drive is an incredible chunk of engineering. It's unfortunate that Zip 100 and Zip 250 arrived so relatively late in the game.