# Floppy Disks



## agpodt77339 (Jan 11, 2008)

I just got a bunch of items from a freecycler including two good sized boxes full of floppy disks. Do these contain any PM's? I know film has silver in it, does the film-like disk parts in the floppy have silver in it? I would try to test it, but I do not have any chemicals yet because I am just in the gathering stage right now.

Thanks,
Chris


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## junkelly (Jan 12, 2008)

agpodt77339 said:


> I know film has silver in it, does the film-like disk parts in the floppy have silver in it?



Photo and x-ray films have silver to produce an image. Floppy disks are for magnetic storage, so I don't see why they would use any silver. The metallic sliding cover and center disk are not magnetic, so they may be worth keeping, but I don't know what type of metal they are...

-junkelly


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## joem (Jan 11, 2011)

I know this thread is old but I just got a 1000 5.25 floopys with an apple 2 clone I just picked up. Online search states no Pm inside only iron oxide.


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## stihl88 (Jan 12, 2011)

Keep a hold of your old Disk Drives also.

I came across this site last year that has mostly HDD for sale, at a premium mind you  
http://www.harddrives-usa.com/home.php

Not sure if they buy from the public? Give them a call and let me know, ive got $2000 worth of 
drives if this is the case :lol:


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## fiat128 (Jul 13, 2011)

junkelly said:


> agpodt77339 said:
> 
> 
> > I know film has silver in it, does the film-like disk parts in the floppy have silver in it?
> ...




I realize this is very old but I thought I'd answer this since I know. The sliding door is aluminum and the center disk is usually steel (it will stick to a magnet). The plastic case is ABS plastic.

The basic answer is that they are pretty much worthless.


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## MMFJ (Aug 9, 2011)

stihl88 said:


> Keep a hold of your old Disk Drives also.



On a similar note, I recently came across ~25 old IBM 286s (what a powerful machine, I recall thinking the first time I saw one.... 

Went digging to see just what we could find - actually quite a bit of yellow stuff in there!

What surprised me a bit was the 5.25" floppy drive - it actually had a lot of tid-bits in there as well (though not much worth going for time-wise).

Here's a pic of what we found (note that the nice bit on the bottom right, I'm not positive it was in there, but it came from the 286 somewhere...)


Other more pressing work at the moment, so this project got put on the back burner, but will try to get more data on the floppy drive and 286s, if that is interesting to anyone.


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