) writes:
what usually breaks down in floppy drives with moderate mileage?


They get full of dirt and grit, because air has been pulled through
them. This obviously varies with the size, since older 5.25" drives
were open, but 3.5" had a flap, except for a lot of Mac 3.5" drives.

They seize up from lack of use.

I suspect heads get mangled, because someone has put a floppy
in badly or the wrong way and tried to jam it in.

Decades ago, a lot was made of adjusting the speed of the motor,
and about head alignment. You don't hear about that much anymore,
but I have no idea if that's because the drives got better, or (and
I suspect this is a more immediate reason) the drives got so cheap
that it made more sense to replace the drive than do labor intensive
alignments.

And the far lower costs (I paid hundreds of dollars for my first drive
in 1984, even about five years later they'd dropped considerably, and
I have no clue how much they cost since I have so many spare drives from
scrapped computers) means that few really keep track of how floppy
drives fail now. They just replace the drive, and that's it.

Michael