15 Facts About Floppy drives

Floppy drives disk or floppy diskette is an obsolete type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk.

Floppy drives disks were so common in late 20th-century culture that many electronic and software programs continue to use save icons that look like floppy disks well into the 21st century.

These disks and associated Floppy drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation.

Floppy drives disks became commonplace during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups.

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

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Flash-based USB-thumb drives finally were a practical and popular replacement, that supported traditional file systems and all common usage scenarios of floppy disks.

Floppy drives disks are used for emergency boots in aging systems lacking support for other bootable media and for BIOS updates, since most BIOS and firmware programs can still be executed from bootable floppy disks.

Generally, the same Floppy drives are used to read and write both types of disks, with only the disks and controllers differing.

Some operating systems using soft sectors, such as Apple DOS, do not use the index hole, and the Floppy drives designed for such systems often lack the corresponding sensor; this was mainly a hardware cost-saving measure.

Later Floppy drives held the heads out of contact until a front-panel lever was rotated or disk insertion was complete (3½-inch).

In some Floppy drives, this is accomplished with a Track Zero Sensor, while for others it involves the drive head striking an immobile reference surface.

All 8-inch and some 5¼-inch Floppy drives used a mechanical method to locate sectors, known as either hard sectors or soft sectors, and is the purpose of the small hole in the jacket, off to the side of the spindle hole.

Family of 8-inch disks and Floppy drives increased over time and later versions could store up to 1.

Double-sided disks could be used in some Floppy drives for single-sided disks, as long as an index signal was not needed.

Floppy drives disk drive and media manufacturers specify the unformatted capacity.