usual floppy drive breakdown?

What sort and size of drive?

Dried out lubricant, and dirty heads.

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

They're still pretty cheap, but eventually, I figure they'll go up in price since so few new PC's even have a floppy drive anymore. But I'm like you, I've got enough spare floppy drives that I don't worry about this anymore.

Jeff