I made a floppy disk from scratch (kottke.org)

Hehe, very nice to see something outside the scope of software or PCBs with this level of useless enthusiasm. Obviously "from scratch" is a bit of a stretch here, but this is the material we come to Hacker News for.

Thanks for sharing!

Edit: sigh, I should probably run my comments through ChatGPT to avoid being downvoted. I like this, I share my enthusiasm. I like the uselessness of it, meaning the uselessness of making a floppy disk in 2025, not the lack of educational value. Sheesh.

TFA is a very short blog post that says you should go watch this YouTube video. Here's a direct link to the video:

https://youtu.be/TBiFGhnXsh8?si=wra84H0R8fy2XCnd

Great work! The video does state this clearly that it was about the journey first and foremost and that's great, but yet to me it feels unfinished when it ends as soon as we get to the really fun stuff, so it's complete in the sense of it being well-produced, publishable content, but it's uploaded as soon as it's publishable, and I'm left with "what, that's it?", as I've mostly been looking at milling and some coating. I get this often with similar videos today. Either it's just me (entirely possible) or it's a sign of the times.

These kinds of hobbies always teach people more than expected.

He gets surprisingly close to viable storage media. Nicely done =3

Title: "I"

First line: "[YouTuber] PolyMatt"

The article just advertises the video. This post could be just the video.

I watched the video when it made the rounds last week. I was impressed with the work and the results. I did wonder, though, if a 5 1/4" disk would have been an easier initial goal, seeing as how the outer envelope is a lot less involved than a 3 1/2".

Oh so OP recreated the Universe?

In the early 80s, a lot of the floppy disks and drives I had to use could have been crafted by cavemen out of a Far Side cartoon.

there is no explanation on how to get the very fine black iron oxide powder in the video, it just appears out of nowhere.

Can you fit Doom on it & play it? Bootable Doom Floppy?

In the new Mission: Impossible film they're tasked with making an 8" disk drive from scratch. That should be his next video :)

While it is a great video, it doesn't seem like he actually made a viable floppy disk in the end. Even if he didn't though, it would have been great to say what was actually achieved in the end: what write density was achieved? Could we write and recover even 1KiB of data?

Iron oxide is not what regular floppy disks use. That's probably what the issue was.

Fun fact: I only recently found out that regular 1.44MB floppy disks could be formatted to 32MB.

How beautifully designed was the IBM floppy disk box, visible at the beginning? Great piece of design and branding!

A 5.25" single-density disk would be literally an order of magnitude easier to make. 4x larger magnetic domains. Larger tracks mean wobble matters less. No tight-tolerance shell. Thicker substrate.