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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently looking for 3.5's for a coding competition that only allows code to fit inside a floppy. Unfortunately they don't send to my radically extreme location.

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Verbatim and TDK and probably a few other still manufacture 3.5 inchers you can buy new stock on Amazon and other retailers globally.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-87410-MF2HD-Inch-MBDiskett...

What?! This goes against everything I believed.

Neither Verbatim nor TDK's website have any current mention of floppy discs. I would assume the listings on Amazon are old stock manufactured 10+ years ago.

IBM say Sony were last to manufacture them, and production ended in March 2011: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/floppy/tr...

Although this article says Sony only had a 70% market share when they stopped production: https://www.cnet.com/deals/sandisks-extreme-pro-2tb-ssd-is-b...

Looks like Verbatim produced them at least until late 2015

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/from-floppy-disks-to-beta...

I’ve seen a TDK pack from Japan with a date code of 2018.

You could get Floppies form Maplin in store in the UK until they went under 5 years ago.

There is still plenty of “fresh” stock out there that seems to be under a decade old, and I’m sure they are still produced in small batches for critical systems and well the Japanese government.

I get mine off eBay with varying success rates. It really is hit or miss. I suggest sticking with the ones that have a metal slide on them rather than the later, cheaper, plastic slides which tend to disintegrate over time.

Out of curiosity why are you buying old ones from eBay rather than new production?

AFAIK, there is no new production. Everything listed as "new" is New Old Stock, which is what I get.

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