4/14/2021 0 Comments Floppy Disk Usb Drive
High-capacity backward compatible floppy technologies became popular for a while and were sold as an option or even included in standard PCs, but in the long run, their use was limited to professionals and enthusiasts.Floppy disks are read from and written to by a floppy disk drive ( FDD ).
USB drives for 5 1 4 -inch, 8-inch, and non-standard floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks. By 1978, there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs. There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM, M 2 FM and GCR. The 5 1 4 -inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, and the hard-sectored disk format disappeared. The most common capacity of the 5 1 4 -inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 KB, for the DSDD (Double-Sided Double-Density) format using MFM encoding. In 1984, IBM introduced with its PC-AT model the 1.2 MB dual-sided 5 1 4 -inch floppy disk, but it never became very popular. IBM started using the 720 KB double-density 3 1 2 -inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and the 1.44 MB high-density version with the PS2 line in 1987. The large market share of the well-established 5 1 4 -inch format made it difficult for these diverse mutually-incompatible new formats to gain significant market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted; by 1988, the 3 1 2 -inch was outselling the 5 1 4 -inch. During this time, PCs frequently came equipped with drives of both sizes. By the mid-1990s, 5 1 4 -inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the 3 1 2 -inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. The advantages of the 3 1 2 -inch disk were its higher capacity, its smaller physical size, and its rigid case which provided better protection from dirt and other environmental risks. If a person touches the exposed disk surface of a 5 1 4 -inch disk through the drive hole, fingerprints may foul the diskand later the disk drive head if the disk is subsequently loaded into a driveand it is also easily possible to damage a disk of this type by folding or creasing it, usually rendering it at least partly unreadable. However, largely due to its simpler construction (with no metal parts) the 5 1 4 -inch disk unit price was lower throughout its history, usually in the range of a third to a half that of a 3 1 2 -inch disk. Before hard disks became affordable to the general population, nb 2 floppy disks were often used to store a computers operating system (OS). Most home computers from that period have an elementary OS and BASIC stored in ROM, with the option of loading a more advanced operating system from a floppy disk. In 1996, there were an estimated five billion standard floppy disks in use. Then, distribution of larger packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROMs, DVDs and online distribution. External USB -based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives. Adoption was limited by the competition between proprietary formats and the need to buy expensive drives for computers where the disks would be used. In some cases, failure in market penetration was exacerbated by the release of higher-capacity versions of the drive and media being not backward-compatible with the original drives, dividing the users between new and old adopters. Consumers were wary of making costly investments into unproven and rapidly changing technologies, so none of the technologies became the established standard. ![]() Other formats, such as Magneto-optical discs, had the flexibility of floppy disks combined with greater capacity, but remained niche due to costs.
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