11 Facts About Floppy disk

The advantages of the 3½-inch Floppy disk were its higher capacity, its smaller physical size, and its rigid case which provided better protection from dirt and other environmental risks.

External USB-based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives.

Two holes at the bottom left and right indicate whether the Floppy disk is write-protected and whether it is high-density; these holes are spaced as far apart as the holes in punched A4 paper, allowing write-protected high-density floppies to be clipped into standard ring binders.

One of the chief usability problems of the floppy disk is its vulnerability; even inside a closed plastic housing, the disk medium is highly sensitive to dust, condensation and temperature extremes.

The tracks are concentric rings around the center, with spaces between tracks where no data is written; gaps with padding bytes are provided between the sectors and at the end of the track to allow for slight speed variations in the Floppy disk drive, and to permit better interoperability with Floppy disk drives connected to other similar systems.

Newer 5¼-inch drives and all 3½-inch drives automatically engage the spindle and heads when a Floppy disk is inserted, doing the opposite with the press of the eject button.

Alongside the common Floppy disk sizes were non-classical sizes for specialized systems.

Floppy disk size is often referred to in inches, even in countries using metric and though the size is defined in metric.

Floppy disk drive and media manufacturers specify the unformatted capacity .

Whereas semiconductor memory naturally favors powers of two, the capacity of a Floppy disk drive is the product of sector size, sectors per track, tracks per side and sides .

Usable data capacity is a function of the Floppy disk format used, which in turn is determined by the FDD controller and its settings.