Okay, it’s probably not the “world’s largest” … but it’s the largest one I’ve ever owned.
I currently own literally thousands of vintage 5 1/4″ floppy disks. Over half of them are the same ones I accumulated back in the 1980s on my Commodore 64. The rest are ones I’ve picked up here and there since then. Up until recently, these disks have been stored in milk crates, cardboard shoe boxes, and mismatched vintage disk containers.
While roaming the stores a few weekends ago I ran across the following storage container:
It’s a Sterilite 3-Drawer Cart. They retail for around $20 and can be found at Walmart, Target, and Big Lots.
As you can see, the cart slid right underneath my built-in desk up in my computer room.
Each drawer holds 3 rows of floppy disks. Each row holds just over 150 floppies; if you pack ’em in tight, you can probably get 500 floppies in each drawer. If you really wanted to, you could probably cut some cardboard “rails” to run in between each row, but so far I haven’t found it to be necessary.
In my defense, Big Lots has terrible lighting and I thought the cart looked black (and not purple) in the store.
largest——- purple——you could name it Barney !
You should do the math and figure out how much data that whole thing could hold in floppies then compare it to a modern day micro sd card…
If the purple is really not your thing, hit it with some Krylon Fusion. It’s in a spray paint can, but is really more like a dye because of the way it bonds so well with plastic. I’ve used it for a few case mod projects and never had any trouble with chipping or flaking.
@Chris: Let’s see … at 500 per drawer, that’s 1,500 floppies. Assuming they’re all C64 floppies, and full, that’s 180k per side (roughly). Just for giggles, let’s say they’re all double sided, too. 360k * 1,500 = 540,000k, or 540 meg, maximum capacity.
That’s pretty cool! I have a similar cart for my 2600 cartridges, now I need one for my C64 and Apple II floppies. About the purple color, purple is the new black :) and I second Krylon Fusion paint. Perfect for many projects, especially as pointed out by you case modifications.
540 Meg… Crazy. Could you imagine going back in time and saying to yourself. “You see that crate full of disks?” “You cant buy a memory stick anywhere near that small, oh and the memory cards that hold 2,4,8,16,32 GB its the size of my pinky fingernail.”
Mr. O’Hara! Base-10 math when dealing with binary sizes?! For shame, sir, for shame… Now go back to the proper base-2 and divide that 540,000 KiB by 1024 (2^10) and you’ll see what you’d really have 527.34 MiB, not accounting for filesystem overhead of course. :-)
Hey Nz17, didn’t the other fella say “meg” and not “mib”?
So, you’re both right.
(but I don’t like u)