Where are floppy disks used? Information carrier floppy disk. Information capacity of a floppy disk

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The history of the storage medium we call "floppy disk" goes back almost four decades. True, the modern 3.5-inch floppy disk is a little younger - it is “only” 29 years old.

At the end of April, Sony Corporation announced its decision to stop producing 3.5-inch computer floppy disks in Japan as of March 2011. Many people have probably long forgotten about the existence of such a medium, but the message sounded symbolic: the company that once upon a time developed this modification of a magnetic disk is solemnly saying goodbye to it.

The history of the storage medium we call "floppy disk" goes back almost four decades. True, the modern 3.5-inch floppy disk is a little younger - it is “only” 29 years old. But what kind! Over these decades, the world has changed beyond recognition: some countries disappeared from the map and others appeared... What about countries, computers have become millions of times more powerful and miniature! Thanks to discoveries in the field information technologies and electronics appeared and became firmly established in life; devices, even the purpose of which few would have guessed forty years ago. Several generations have passed computer technology, and the floppy disk remained almost the same as immediately after birth.

It is believed that the first “memory disk”, which was later called a “floppy disk”, was released by the American company IBM in 1971. Work on flexible magnetic disks began back in 1967: a group of engineers led by Alan Shugart was tasked with developing an inexpensive (no more than $5) and reliable removable media for storing and transferring computer firmware. It sounds funny today, but the problem was that the firmware for processors and other electronics was then stored in semiconductor memory, which was simply erased whenever the power was turned off.

Senior engineer David Noble proposed a solution quite in the spirit of the times: an 8-inch plastic disk, on which a layer of magnetic iron oxide Fe3O4 was deposited. To protect the disk from dust, a soft case made of non-woven material was invented, which at the same time wiped the media during rotation. The capacity of this world's first floppy disk was as much as 80 KB and, after passing tests, the device for working with these drives received registration in the IBM System 370 machine.

Floppy drive and 8-inch floppy disk

With the advent of the first personal computers, the need arose for a more compact removable media. Since the vast majority of such cars did not have hard drive- it was too expensive - the operating system was loaded from one floppy disk, which was then removed and replaced with a floppy disk with the desired application and data. Two drives greatly simplified the work, and to install them in one computer they had to be not too large in size.

Legend has it that one day in a bar, engineers Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro were discussing with the head of Wang Laboratories, En Vaughn. optimal sizes such a carrier. The attention of the interlocutors was attracted by an ordinary napkin, the dimensions of which were taken as a basis - this is how floppy disks with a diameter of 5.25 inches appeared in 1976.

5.25-inch

Their initial capacity was already 98.5 KB, and a little later - 110 KB. Floppy disks could have one (SS) or two working surfaces (DS), which, naturally, doubled their capacity, and in 1978 the production of “double density” (DD) floppy disks began - 360 KB. On protective case special holes appeared that allowed the drive to determine their capacity, as well as a square cutout that prevented accidental erasure of data: in order to record it, it had to be sealed.

As the years passed, computers became smaller and smaller, but floppy disks remained the same. Moreover, they had significant drawback- they easily bent and became useless. Many companies offered their own versions of smaller media with a diameter of 3 to 3.5 inches - in particular, the 3-inch Mitsumi QuickDisk even became the standard for electronic keyboards in the mid-eighties.

But Sony was luckier than others: in 1982, the Microfloppy Industry Committee consortium, which united 23 magnetic disk manufacturers, adopted the design developed in 1981 by Japanese engineers as the basis for a new standard. The first 3.5-inch floppy disks, exactly the same in appearance as those sold today, appeared on the market in 1983.

3.5" floppy disk

Unlike previous " floppy disks", the new ones were placed in a hard plastic case and now they could only be bent by breaking them. However, the English name remained the same, “floppy disk” - to distinguish it from the increasingly common “hard drives”.

The capacity of 3.5-inch floppy disks was also constantly growing: at first, 360 (on a PC) or 400 (on a Macintosh) KB of data could be written to such media, then “double-sided” disks with 720 (PC) or 800 (Macintosh) KB appeared, and in 1987, the HD format was introduced, allowing 1.44 MB of data to be stored on one magnetic disk. So, strictly speaking, the modern floppy disk is only 23 years old - the most creative age by human standards: no longer youth, but not yet maturity.

And attempts to bury the 3.5-inch floppy disk began, one might say, from her very childhood: in 1998 Apple company pointedly refused to build a floppy drive into her new iMac G3 desktop computer - and this despite the fact that all Macintoshes up to that point were necessarily equipped with such a drive! The computer was made in the form of a candy bar, and right under the screen there was a slot for loading the most modern media for those years - a CD. Even then, according to the company’s marketers, the spread of CD burners, office local networks and appearance public internet makes floppy disks with their tiny capacity simply unnecessary.

iMac G3

As time has shown, Apple was in a hurry, but not by much: in 2003, the largest computer manufacturer in the United States, Dell, stopped installing floppy drives in desktop computers as a standard equipment. A little earlier, “flop swallowers” disappeared from laptops. The era of floppy disks is over.

However, it is still too early to say goodbye to floppy disks completely. You will be surprised, but floppy disks are still used in quite modern industries: in aviation - for updating navigation databases, in test telecommunications equipment - for recording logs, in machines for metal working and molding plastic parts - for downloading programs. Floppy disks in all countries are loved by all kinds of government bodies and, especially, tax inspectorates. Finally, floppy disks are still used to program keyboard synthesizers and even ATMs!

So it’s too early to write off 3.5-inch floppy disks. Moreover, another one of largest producers"floppy disks", the Verbatim company, with all responsibility, assures that we will see these wonderful boxes on the shelves of electronics stores for a long time.

A floppy disk is a portable magnetic storage medium used for repeated recording and storage of relatively small data. This type of media was especially common in the 1970s - late 1990s. Instead of the term “floppy disk”, the abbreviation GMD is sometimes used - “flexible magnetic disk"(Accordingly, a device for working with floppy disks is called a floppy disk drive).
Typically, a floppy disk is a flexible plastic plate coated with a ferromagnetic layer, hence the English name “floppy disk”. This plate is placed in a plastic case that protects the magnetic layer from physical damage. The shell can be flexible or rigid. Writing and reading floppy disks is carried out using a special device - a floppy disk drive (floppy drive).
Floppy disks typically have a write-protect feature that allows read-only access to the data.

Story

1971 - The first floppy disk with a diameter of 200 mm (8″) and a corresponding floppy drive was introduced by IBM. The invention itself is usually credited to Alan Shugart, who worked for IBM in the late 1960s.
1973 - Alan Shugert founded his own firm, Shugart Associates.
1976 - Alan Shugert developed the 5.25″ floppy disk.
1981 - Sony introduces the 3.5″ (90 mm) floppy disk. In the first version, the volume is 720 kilobytes (9 sectors). Later version has a volume of 1440 kilobytes or 1.40 megabytes (18 sectors). It is this type of floppy disk that becomes the standard (after IBM uses it in its IBM PC).
Later, the so-called ED floppy disks (from the English Extended Density - “extended density”) appeared, which had a volume of 2880 kilobytes (36 sectors), which never became widespread.

Formats

Chronology of the emergence of floppy disk formats
Format	Year of origin	Volume in kilobytes
8	1971	80
8"	1973	256
8"	1974	800
8″ double density	1975	1000
5.25″	1976	110
5.25″ double density	1978	360
5.25″ quad density	1982	720
5.25″ high density	1984	1200
3″	1982	360
3″ double density	1984	720
3.5″ dual density	1984	720
2″	1985	720?
3.5″ high density	1987	1440
3.5″ extended density	1991	2880

It should be noted that the actual capacity of floppy disks depended on how they were formatted. Since, apart from the earliest models, virtually all floppy disks did not contain rigidly formed tracks, there is room for experimentation in the field of more effective use floppy disk was open to system programmers. The result was the emergence of many incompatible floppy disk formats, even under the same operating systems. For example, for RT-11 and its versions adapted in the USSR, the number of incompatible floppy disk formats in circulation exceeded a dozen. (The most famous are MX, MY used in DCK).
Additional confusion was caused by the fact that Apple used disk drives in its Macintosh computers that used a different principle of magnetic recording encoding than on the IBM PC. As a result, despite the use of identical floppy disks, transferring information between platforms on floppy disks was not possible until Apple introduced high-density SuperDrive disk drives that operated in both modes.
The "standard" IBM PC floppy disk formats differed in the size of the disk, the number of sectors per track, the number of sides used (SS stands for single-sided floppy, DS stands for double-sided), and the type (recording density) of the floppy drive. The drive type was marked as SD - single density, DD - double density, QD - quadruple density (used in clones such as Robotron-1910 - 5.25″ floppy disk 720 K, Amstrad PC, PC Neuron - 5.25″ floppy disk 640 K , HD - high density (differed from QD in the increased number of sectors), ED - extended density.

8-inch drives have long been included in the BIOS and supported by MS-DOS, but there is no clear information on whether they were shipped to consumers (they may have been shipped to businesses and organizations and not sold to individuals). In addition to the above format variations, there were a number of improvements and deviations from the standard floppy disk format.
The most famous - 320/360 KB floppy disks Iskra-1030/Iskra-1031 - were actually SS/QD floppy disks, but their boot sector was marked as DS/DD. As a result, the standard IBM PC disk drive could not read them without using special drivers (800.com), and the Iskra-1030/Iskra-1031 disk drive, accordingly, could not read standard DS/DD floppy disks from the IBM PC.
Special driver-extenders BIOS 800, pu_1700 and a number of others made it possible to format floppy disks with an arbitrary number of tracks and sectors. Since disk drives usually supported from one to 4 additional tracks, and also allowed, depending on design features, to format 1-4 sectors per track more than required by the standard, these drivers provided the appearance of such non-standard formats as 800 KB (80 tracks, 10 sectors) 840 KB (84 tracks, 10 sectors), etc. The maximum capacity consistently achieved by this method on 3.5″ HD drives was 1700 KB.
This technique was subsequently used in Windows 98, as well as Microsoft's DMF floppy format, which expanded the capacity of floppy disks to 1.68 MB by formatting floppy disks into 21 sectors in a similar IBM XDF format. XDF was used in OS/2 distributions, and DMF was used in various distributions software products from Microsoft.
The pu_1700 driver also made it possible to provide formatting with shifting and interleaving of sectors - this accelerated sequential read-write operations, but did not allow compatibility even with the standard number of sectors, sides and tracks. Finally, a fairly common modification of the format of 3.5″ floppy disks is their formatting to 1.2 MB (with a reduced number of sectors). This feature can usually be enabled in the BIOS of modern computers. This use of 3.5″ is typical for Japan and South Africa. As a side effect, activation of this BIOS settings usually makes it possible to read floppy disks formatted using type 800 drivers.
Additional (non-standard) tracks and sectors sometimes contained copy protection data for proprietary floppy disks. Standard programs, such as diskcopy, did not transfer these sectors when copying. The unformatted capacity of a 3.5″ floppy disk, determined by the recording density and storage area, is 2 MB.
The height of a 5.25″ floppy drive is 1 U. All CD drives, including Blu-ray drives, are the same width and height as a 5.25″ floppy drive (this does not apply to laptop drives). The width of the 5.25″ drive is almost equal to three times its height. This was sometimes used by computer case manufacturers, where three devices placed in a square “basket” could be reoriented with it from a horizontal to a vertical orientation.

Apparently, 2007 will be the last year for the once popular 3.5-inch floppy disks. If, according to official statistics, in 1988, 2 billion floppy disks were sold annually in the world, then in 2006 this number fell to 700 million.

"Back in 1967. Specialists from the IBM laboratory from San Jose, engaged in the development of storage media, are trying to create an inexpensive device capable of storing and transmitting firmware for processors, mainframes and control modules. The price of the device should not exceed 5 USD (otherwise, it will not be considered replaceable). Delivery should not cause any difficulties, and reliability should not cause doubts."

Now it’s 2005 - 38 years have passed since the first prototype appeared, but FDD continues to live! What is the secret of such vitality of this “relic” of the past, the same as matrix printer or COM port? It is now difficult for us to understand what revolution a regular floppy disk caused in its time. In an instant, tons of punched cards and kilometers of magnetic tape were no longer needed. One plastic envelope and no problems or errors! What will be discussed today should fully reveal to the reader the genius of such an inconspicuous, at first glance, invention as an ordinary floppy disk.

It is believed that floppy drive disks were invented in 1971 to solve a problem that IBM faced when creating the System 370 computer. The problem was that the programs stored in its semiconductor memory were erased whenever the computer's power was turned off. "To reboot the machine, we had to write it into memory again control program“,” recalled Al Shugart, who was then the manager of storage devices direct access at IBM. Subsequently, the founder of Shugart Associates and a manufacturer of storage devices - Seagate Technology.

Although Shugart is often called the father of the floppy disk, he himself considers David Noble to be its real creator. Noble, was a senior engineer at the San Jose laboratory and steadfastly bore the rigors of work as Shugart's only subordinate. First of all, Noble tested the then existing technologies. But I soon realized that we had to look for fundamentally new ways. It was then that the first floppy disk was proposed. Within a year, Noble (whose group had already expanded significantly) completed work on a device that IBM called a “memory disk.” It was actually a floppy disk. It was an 8-inch plastic disk coated with ferrous oxide, providing read-only access. This disk weighed about 2 ounces, its capacity was 80 KB. A turning point in the creation of the floppy disk was the invention of the protective case. “We got our disk to work, but we couldn’t come up with a good protective shell for it,” Shugart recalled. - “Any speck of dust completely destroyed the data. The percentage of errors was very high.” And so the developers came up with the idea of placing the device in a case made of non-woven material, which would ensure constant wiping of the surface of the floppy disk as it rotates. This way the surface always remained clean. “That idea ultimately made the difference,” says Shugart.

After extensive testing, the floppy disk was built into the System 370; this happened in 1971. It was also used to load firmware into IBM's Merlin 3330 disk package controller.

Yet the floppy disk design, introduced in 1971, did not become the industry standard, said Jim Porter, now president of the research firm Disk/Trend. In those times about which we're talking about, Porter worked at MEMOREX - independent company, engaged in the production of floppy disks. In 1973, IBM introduced a new version of the floppy disk, this time for the 3704 Data Entry System. “The recording format was completely different, and the floppy disk rotated in the wrong direction,” Porter explained. It provided read-write capabilities and allowed storage of up to 256 KB of data. Users now have the ability to enter data from floppy disks rather than punched cards. Fundamental difference The invention from all previous ones was a floppy disk drive (flexible disk, or simply floppy disk), where there were two motors: one ensured a stable rotation speed of the floppy disk inserted into the drive, and the second moved the read-write head. The rotation speed of the first engine depended on the type of floppy disk and ranged from 300 to 360 rpm. The motor for moving the heads in these drives has always been a stepper motor. With its help, the heads moved along a radius from the edge of the disk to its center at discrete intervals. Unlike a hard drive, the heads in this device did not “hover” above the surface, but touched it.

IBM representatives claimed that the new device can accommodate the same amount of information as 3 thousand punched cards. The release of a new floppy disk was a kind of firing of the starting gun for manufacturers of these devices. Even now some companies use eight-inch floppy disks!!! Mainly when working with computerized machines. But in 1976, around the same time as the first personal computers, the 5.25-inch floppy disk was developed.

According to Porter (Wang Laboratories) - who worked on desktop computer, which could perform the functions word processor: — “The eight-inch floppy disk was obviously too big for him.” The company, in collaboration with Shugart Associates, began work on a smaller device." "We discussed the size of the floppy disk very heatedly - we spent the whole night in one of the bars in Boston. The answer was suggested to us by chance - someone noticed a napkin placed under a glass of cocktail; its size was exactly 5.25 inches,” Porter recalled. “We stole it, brought it to Boston and told our engineers: “Since such a trifle is in demand, let our floppy disk be the same size.” The improvement of floppy disks did not stop at the size of a napkin; as a result, the now so popular three-inch floppy disk, developed by Sony Corporation more than 30 years ago, appeared. This drive has lived a rich life and lives to this day, although it should be noted that most companies have already abandoned their own production of three-inch floppy disks. One of the first companies to close its floppy disk factories was KAO in 1996, followed by IBM and 3M/Imation. Most of these companies have transferred production to third parties or switched to the now newfangled practice of outsourcing. Already in the mid-90s, all experts started talking about the fact that the speed, and most importantly, the capacity of floppy disks, no longer meets the needs of today. Consumption of standard floppy disks stabilized, and by the end of 2000, sales began to decline worldwide.

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Floppy disks are a relic of the past for most computers used today, but for a long time they served as the only source of transferring information between computers. These disks are floppy disks that were labeled "3.5 [A] Disk" in Windows. This device can still be found on old computers.

History of floppies

The spread of floppy disks began when A. Shugart from IBM invented them. At first, this device was huge - about 8 inches (more than 20 cm). Almost immediately, synonyms for this name appeared, such as “floppy disk”, “floppy disk”. The latter name appeared later, when floppies became smaller in size and reached 5.25 inches. At this time, their capacity was 360 kilobytes, which today is even difficult to imagine, since today the most small files measured in megabytes.

By the mid-80s of the last century, the floppy disk size was 3.5 inches. This floppy disk existed until the final transition to various disks and flash drives.

The capacity of floppy disks could vary, since the standard capacity was installed on an unformatted floppy disk, and different formatting methods were used. In this regard, formats appeared that were incompatible with each other. The Macintosh company used diskette drives with a different recording encoding principle compared to IBM, which did not allow information on floppy disks to be transferred between different operating systems until Apple created diskette drives SuperDrive, which worked in two modes.

Floppy disk device

Information is recorded on a thin plastic disk, which is protected on top by hard plastic, which has an open area on top, closed by a special curtain, usually metal. Under the hard plastic was an anti-dust cloth. The disk underneath is coated with ferromagnetic material. By analogy with a hard drive, it is divided into tracks and sectors. A floppy disk has two surfaces on which recording can be done simultaneously (although there were also single-sided floppy disks, marked SS), since the magnetic heads are placed offset relative to each other, and therefore no interference is created during recording. The disk begins to move when the motor engages with the center of the disk, made of metal. Depending on where the recording is going, it makes 300-360 revolutions per minute.

The floppy disk had a plug that allowed or prohibited writing to the floppy disk.

Floppy disk formats

The most common floppy disk formats differed in the number of sides used, recording density, number of sectors per track, and disk size. The drive could have single (SD), double (DD) or quarter density (QD) (this density was used in clones with 5.25-inch floppy disks of 640 and 720 kilobytes in size), as well as high density(HD), which differed from the previous one in the increased number of sectors, extended density (ED), in which floppy disks had 36 sectors (standard - 18 sectors) and a volume of 2880 kilobytes, but there were many negative reviews, and therefore they were not widespread.

5.25 and 8" floppy disks could have a capacity of 160 to 180 kilobytes. 8" floppy disks had only one side for recording. 5.25" floppy disks for DD drives already had a capacity of 320-360 kilobytes, which is 3. The 5-inch floppy disk increased to 720 kilobytes (SD and QD were absent for the 3.5-inch floppy disk), the QD for 5.25" had a volume of 640-720 kilobytes, the HD 3.5" had 1440 kilobytes, 5.25" - 1200 kilobytes.

There were deviations from these standards, for example, for the Iskra-1030 (1031) computers, 320/360 kB floppy disks were used, which were actually SS/QD, but their boot sector were marked as DS/DD, which meant that the IBM PC disk drive could not read them, just like the IBM PC floppy drive on these computers.

Advantages of a floppy disk

Recording is carried out using a simple algorithm.
Low cost.
Affordability and versatility (in recent times, all computers were equipped with a floppy drive).
The optimal volume for that time for transferring information between computers not connected to a network.
Rewritability.

Disadvantages of floppies

While the volume was optimal for transfer text files, spreadsheets, it was small for photographs, pictures, the capacity of the floppy disk (1.44 megabytes) was poorly suited for transferring software, especially when its size began to grow with terrifying speed.
Constant creaking when recording.
Slow recording speed.
Unreliability (if one sector is damaged, the entire disk could become unreadable).
Short service life (usually after several uses the disk was damaged, largely due to the fact that the plastic surface did not protect it reliably).

These shortcomings led to the fact that most users left negative reviews about floppy disks, which gradually led to the creation of new storage media and the disappearance of floppy disks.

Disconnecting the floppy disk

As a rule, this safe removal no floppy disk required. There is a button on the floppy disk drive, with which the floppy disk was removed after the end of the noise it produced, which indicated the end of recording.

IN in this case the question of how to disable a floppy disk can be considered in relation to Computer BIOS. So, by going into the BIOS and going to its Standard CMOS Features section, you can see, depending on the type of floppy disk used, the designation Drive A or Drive B; opposite, information about the capacity and size is indicated. If you need to disable it, you need to press the “+” button until the word None appears instead of capacity and size, after which you need to press F10 to save the changes and reboot.

Floppy emulators

The appearance of these programs was due to the fact that floppy disk drives began to gradually disappear from computers, while some programs required a floppy disk to write files. Some accounting programs refused to save the file anywhere except to a floppy disk.

One of the most common emulator programs was Virtual program Floppy Drive, which provided full integration of the drive, which was virtual, with the operating system Windows system before its version of Vista, it was possible to create virtual floppy disks on which you could place necessary information, provided support for virtual 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disks with support for capacities from 160 KB to 2.88 MB. These floppy disks could be formatted and also, which was important for that time, run in console form.

There were many such floppy disk emulators released, but all of them were characterized by approximately the same algorithm of operation.

Disappearance of floppy disks

The edges of the casing covering the plastic disk periodically bent, causing the floppy disk to get stuck in the drive; the spring, which was supposed to return the casing to its original state, could move, which led to the fact that the floppy disk was not closed by the casing as it should have been be closed. When a floppy disk was dropped on the floor, the disk often failed. All this needed improvement.

But new times have come with new technologies. Recordable and rewritable CDs first appeared, then DVDs, etc., then flash media appeared, which had a lower cost per unit of capacity, greater durability, and a greater number of rewrite cycles. All this led to the fact that new computers increasingly lacked floppy drives, and gradually floppy disks practically disappeared from our everyday life.

Cinquefoil bush Floppy Disk

With the almost complete disappearance of floppy disks in today's life, their name has not disappeared. Floppy Disk can be used as a low hedge, on rocky terraces, along with shrubs and trees, rock gardens and as a border. It has bright pink semi-double flowers with yellowness in the middle on a bush up to 40 cm high. This shrub loves light and tolerates frosts and winters well.

Finally

Floppy disks were portable data storage used when there was no network between computers and for some programs that did automatic saving data to a floppy disk. Later, floppy disk emulators began to be used for such programs. Floppy disks developed extremely slowly, their design and capacity were imperfect, which contributed to their extinction. But the name "Floppy Disk" was left in the name of one of the decorative cinquefoils.

One of the oldest devices for storing information on a personal computer is a floppy disk drive, or FDD (Floppy Disk Drive) for short. This device, widely used during the 1970s-2000s, is now rarely seen in modern computers. However, in some cases you can still see a floppy drive installed in an old PC. In addition, external floppy drives are sometimes used, connected to the computer through I/O ports.

The first floppy disk drive and floppy disk were 8 inches wide and were invented by engineer Alan Shugart, who worked at IBM, in the early 1970s. In the mid-1970s, he also developed a 5.25-inch floppy disk and a drive for reading it. In 1981, Sony developed a floppy disk and a 3.5-inch drive. Initially, the capacity of such a floppy disk was 720 KB, but later its capacity was doubled.

Repeated attempts have been made to improve floppy disks based on the 3.5-inch format. For example, in 1987, a 2.88 MB floppy disk drive was developed, and in the late 1990s. – LS-120 standard with an even larger disk capacity of 120 MB. However, all these modifications have not become widespread, largely due to the high cost of drives and media.

Principle of operation

The operating principle of FDD is very similar to hard disks. Inside a floppy disk, just like inside a hard drive, there is a flat disk with a magnetic layer applied to it, and information from the disk is read using a magnetic head. However, there are also differences. First of all, a floppy disk is not made of a hard material, but of a flexible polymer film, similar to magnetic tape. That is why disks of this type are called flexible. In addition, the floppy disk does not rotate constantly, but only when a request comes from operating system to read information.

The advantage of FDD over a hard drive is media removability. However, floppy drive also has many disadvantages. In addition to the extremely low operating speed, this is also low reliability of information storage, as well as low storage capacity - approximately 1.44 MB for 3.5-inch floppy disks. True, when using non-standard ways By formatting, the capacity of a floppy disk can be slightly increased, but, as a rule, this leads to an even greater decrease in recording reliability.

Varieties

IN personal computers type IBM PC, two main types of FDD were used - 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch. Both types of drives are designed for floppy disks various types and sizes and are incompatible with each other. This situation is different from that of optical drives, which can read both 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch disks. At one time there were also 8-inch FDDs, but already in the 80s. Such drives have fallen out of use. Around the 1990s. 5.25-inch drives have also finally gone out of use. 3.5-inch floppy drives lasted longer, until the end of the 2000s, and even now you can occasionally see them here and there.

Comparative sizes of internal 8, 5.25, and 3.5-inch drives

Examples of Floppy drives in order of priority: 8-inch, 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch

The 5.25-inch floppy disk is a disk in a cardboard case, reminiscent of an envelope, and has a slot for the read head. Such a floppy disk fully justifies its name “flexible”, since its body can be bent by hand without much effort. However, it is not recommended to intentionally bend the floppy disk too much, as this will almost inevitably lead to its failure.

The 3.5-inch floppy disk does not have this drawback. It has a magnetic disk enclosed in a hard plastic case and bending it with your hands is not so easy. In addition, the 3.5-inch floppy disk has a special metal curtain that hides the slot for the read head. Another feature of a floppy disk is the presence of a switch that blocks writing to the disk. A standard 3.5-inch floppy disk has a capacity of 1.44 MB, which is larger than the maximum capacity of a 5.25-inch floppy disk, which is 1.2 MB.

Examples of floppies are from left to right 8, 5.25, and 3.5.

The design of the 3.5" FDD is also different from the 5.25" one. If, when inserting a floppy disk into the slot of a 5.25-inch drive, the user needs to fix the floppy disk by turning the lever, then the 3.5-inch diskette is locked in the drive automatically, and the floppy disk is ejected back using a special button.

As with many other drives, there are mobile versions floppy drives – external floppy drives. An external floppy drive is convenient because it does not take up space in the system unit, especially if the need to use floppy disks arises rarely. Such an FDD drive can be connected to a PC using a USB connector or an LPT connector.

Application

Although hard drives appeared in the first IBM-compatible personal computers, nevertheless, not a single computer could do without a device for removable drives. A similar device was the floppy drive, which quickly gained popularity due to the simplicity and low cost of both the drive itself and the storage media - floppy disks.

However, in some cases, a floppy drive could completely replace HDD. When the author of these lines got his first IBM-compatible computer, he had neither a hard drive, nor, moreover, optical drive, but just a 3.5-inch floppy drive and a set of floppy disks with software provided by the PC seller. The computer was fully functional. Of course, we are talking about using Windows 3, or about running any large programs, there was no talk, but when using MS-DOS it was possible to deal with most of the programs and games existing at that time (early 90s). This suggests that floppy disks are capable of satisfying the user's basic information storage needs. Besides, floppy disks at one time they were indispensable when it was necessary to reboot the computer for a preventative check or install a new OS.

Setting up a floppy drive in the BIOS

There are several options in the BIOS that allow you to configure floppy drive settings. For example, the option allows you to disable the floppy drive controller if it is not used in the system, thereby freeing up one system interrupt. Also, in some BIOSes, you can manually set the type and size of the drive media, as well as set the write ban on floppy disks.

Conclusion

Today, many users may not even know what a floppy drive or even a regular floppy disk looks like. Their functions were taken over by memory cards and flash drives. In most system units, the only thing that reminds us of a floppy drive is the 3-inch external bay left for them, and in the OS Windows family– unused first letters of logical drives (A and B), reserved for floppy drives. However, floppy disk drives are often found in older computers. In addition, floppy drives can be useful when booting a PC for the purpose of carrying out preventative maintenance of the computer or when installing an OS.