Is your Amiga hardware reliable when reading HD disks formatted as DD disks?

[Hanzu]

Hi, can someone please provide me a link or other information if there is a way to make HD disks more reliable in use as Amiga DD formatted.

I mean if there is a way to tune or check DD diskdrives to enchance their 'HD disk formatted as DD disk' reading and writing reliability.

I remember buying Workbench disks or buing hardware with drivers or utility on HD disks and they gave read errors almost instantly. So it looks like decades old DDs read better than HDs that are used almost for the first time. Could this be some head alingment difference thing.

Amazes me to see HD disks are used in commercial Amiga games (https://amiga.abime.net/games/view/athanor-2#scans). so I hope their reliability is not as common problem as I think.

[jbenam]

I remember having issues with them BITD when they were new, so I imagine that today would be even worse - wouldn’t trust them much these days after being in storage for 30 years. There are people that swear they never had any issue with their 30-year old HD floppies, so your mileage may vary.

Granted, most of the HD floppies that gave me issues were probably el cheapo no-name brands, but the Amiga drive wasn’t made with HD in mind anyway. I remember reading that HD floppies require a much stronger magnetic force to be written reliably, something that a normal Amiga stock drive can’t provide. I wonder if a modified PC drive would alleviate this issue somehow?

Anyway I suspect that Amiga games written on an HD floppy using a Greasweazle and a PC drive would be much more reliable, but I have never looked into this. Maybe that’s how these new games are using HD floppies without issues?

[Bren McGuire]

the problem isnt the Amiga hardware its the media you're not supposed to use HD disks as DD its unreliable if you want to read more there's plenty of articles online explaining why.

solution is buy DD disks. www.floppydisk.com

[Nightshft]

There's an answer missing:
"I use HD disks formatted as Amiga DD disk and most of the time they work fine."

A few years ago I was surprised that formatting HD Disks (as DD) often works and I've did it a few times since then.
Many of them work, some of them fail. But also many of my DD disks became bad over time, so I appreciate the additional possibility.

PS: I wonder how much it depends on the specific floppy drive used.

[Jope]

The 3.5" HD disks aren't that far off from a DD disk so that they will mostly work, depending on the drive and whether they were PC formatted before.

You might get better results if you wipe them down with a neodymium magnet before formatting as DD..

[pandy71]

HD floppy use magnetic media with higher coercivity and as such they require higher writing current but from my experience they worked in DD drives just fine (at some point i had HD floppies for free - PC drivers was frequently distributed on HD floppies) - never experienced errors but it was over 25 years ago - how they behave today is a big unknown to me (i hope that they should work just fine).

[Calabazam]

I use HD floppy disks when i want to format a new disk because i have a few boxes still new but they always fail at short time. Unsure if this is because of the HD disks or failing floppy Amiga drives.

[Jope]

5.25" HD is double the coercivity of 5.25" DD, so it will not work at all, but 3.5" is around 700 Oe for HD and 600 Oe for DD, so it is possible to find a drive / disk combo that will work.