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The floppy drive has not changed for over
a decade in large part because of its universality. The 3.5 inch 1.44 MB
(megabyte) floppy drive is
present on virtually every modern PC today. The floppy drive is still the most universal
drive for transferring files from one PC to another. Even modern Apple and UNIX
machine
can read basic text files written on PCs making these disks useful for cross-platform
transfer. The floppy disk is still used for storing and backing up small amounts of data
using several different disk formats. The high density 5.25
1.2 MB floppy disk debuted in the IBM AT in
1984 as a standard feature, requiring a floppy disk controller capable of 500
Kbps (kilobytes per second) data transfer. The 1.2 MB floppy disk can read
and write 360 KB floppies, making the 5.25 inch 360 KB floppy drive and media
obsolete.
The original version of the 3.5 inch floppy disk held 720 KB of data and was introduced in 1986. This version of the 3.5
inch
never became very popular both because it offered less capacity than the 1.2 MB drive, and
because it was so quickly replaced by the high density 3.5 inch disks in 1987.
The highest-capacity format for floppy
disks is the 2.88 MB 3.5 inch disk that was developed by Toshiba in 1989. The 2.88 MB
offers double the capacity of the 1.44 MB disk by using special media and a special
recording method. By the time the 2.88 MB went into full production, the PC explosion was
well underway with a very large number of these existing machines using 1.44 MB disks. The
1.44 was the standard and so people were reluctant to use 2.88 MB disks because of the
number of PCs that could not read them. Even so all new PCs are capable of
supporting the 2.88 MB disk. |
