Buying preformated disks was shunned on.įloppies naturally loose their content (and format is also just content) over time. In 'ye good old days' it was necessary to get best results, as every drive was aligned a bit different. Having said that, it was always a good idea to format a floppy before (re-) using it. The misconception of a 'high-level' format (or what ever the counterpart would be) of a floppy is easy to receive from the MS Windows concept of 'fast format' - which simply clears FAT and root directory but doesn't really format anything - in conjunction with drive specific 'low level' formating introduced as buzzword with hard disks (*1). Low level formatting won't help with any of this.Īnd then there's the whole issue of possible defects in the drive: Misalignment, dirt on the read-write-head which will make the read signal weaker, and also cause read errors, etc.įirst of all, there is no such thing as not 'low-level' formating of a floppy. If stored improperly, moisture can form between the sleeve and the floppy, which can lead to mold and other things that may detoriate the surface. On the other hand, floppies may go bad for other reasons: The magnetic coating may come off gradually due to friction, and a detoriating sleeve material will speed up this process. If you low-level format them, you'll also refresh the flux pattern that's used for "administrative" purposes (finding sector start and end), not only the data itself. The magnetic flux pattern on the floppy disk that is used to store the sector address, the begin and end markers, and the data itself, gets weaker over time. How long they'll stay usable depends on a lot of things. A 3½-inch floppy disk removed from its housingĪ floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a 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.It won't improve "disk longevity", but it will make the disks usable again. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive ( FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM, had a disk diameter of 8 inches (203.2 mm). Subsequently, the 5¼-inch and then the 3½-inch became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks.įloppy 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. While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater data storage capacity and data transfer speed, such as USB flash drives, memory cards, optical discs, and storage available through local computer networks and cloud storage. The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (203.2 mm) in diameter they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and then were sold separately starting in 1972 by Memorex and others. These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970, and although IBM announced its first media as the Type 1 Diskette in 1973, the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy". In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the 5¼-inch FDD. By 1978, there were more than ten manufacturers producing such FDDs. There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as differential Manchester encoding (DM), modified frequency modulation (MFM), M 2FM and group coded recording (GCR). The 5¼-inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most uses, and the hard-sectored disk format disappeared. The most common capacity of the 5¼-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 KB, for the Double-Sided Double-Density (DSDD) format using MFM encoding.
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