Floppy Disk drives

8" Floppy Disk: In the late 1960s IBM invented the 8-inch floppy disk. This was the first floppy disk design. Used in the 1970s and as a read-only disk it had storage-write restrictions to the people it was distributed to. However, later on a read-write format came about. In today's modern society it is rare to find a computer that uses the 8-inch floppy disk.

5.25" Floppy Disk: This disk was introduced some time later, and was used extensively in the 1980s.

3.5" Floppy Disk: This storage medium is the most common of those listed in this section, still in somewhat wide use today. Floppy disks hold from 400 KB up to 1.44 MB. The most common types found are 720 KB (low-density) and 1.44 MB (high-density). Floppy disks have largely been superseded as a transfer medium, first by rewritable CD-ROM (CD-RW) drives and now by flash drives, but are still used as backup storage for small amounts of data. A fair proportion also survive as original installation media for older software applications.

Several other floppy types and sizes have been introduced, such as 2", 2.5" and several competing 3" and 3.25" formats as well as the ~120 MB SuperDrive which was compatible with standard 3.5" disks, but none of these were ever very popular and all are quite rare now. Recently, it has become increasingly common for computers to be manufactured without floppy disk drives, and even some motherboards lack standard floppy disk connection headers, so it is expected that the floppy disk will soon fade completely from general use.

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