Related subjects: Computing hardware and infrastructure Floppy Disk DriveĪ 3.5 inch diskette, removed from its casing.Ī floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible ("floppy") magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. Most over-formatting utilities don't handle ED disks, as the format never gained much popularity.2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Current archiving tools like Winimage also support disks with increased capacity. Even Microsoft made use of this by introducing the DMF format (1.68 MB) for distributing software on disks. Well known tools are fdformat (fdread), vgacopy (vgaread). By loading a small TSR-driver such formatted disks could be used like the normal 1.44 MB formatted disks in DOS. Software utilities appeared that could format disks to higher capacities like 1.72 MB. In the 1990s the demand for higher capacities increased. On older Macs the DD disks formatted to around 820 KB, and on Amiga 880 KB. On PC's, DD disks were usually (DOS-)formatted to 720 KB (though in practice it had about 714 KB of usable space), HD disks formatted to 1.44 MB (in practice it was around 1.38 MB) and the uncommon 2.88 MB disks (primarily used in IBM PS/2s) formatted to around 2.76MB. Like earlier floppies, there were many different ways to format a disk, often depending on what type of computer the disk was formatted with. Despite the more rugged design, 3.5 inch floppy drives tend to to be less reliable due to their compact nature.ģ.5" floppies came in three different densities (easily distinguished by a second hole on the side) and while only the earliest disks were single sided, almost all 3.5" floppies can be written to on both sides. The disks are housed in a stiff casing, opposed to the "floppy" plastic the 5.25" disk was housed in. This format was designed to be smaller than the 5.25" floppy drive and its media and fixed some of the 5.25" design problems.
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