Floppy Diskettes
Most or all 5150 PCs had one or two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives. These were either single-sided double-density (SSDD) or double-sided double-density (DSDD) drives. The IBM PC never used single density floppy drives. The drives and disks were commonly referred to by capacity, such as "160KB floppy disk" or "360KB floppy drive". DSDD drives were backwards compatible; they could read and write SSDD floppies. The same type of physical diskette media could be used for both drives, but a disk formated for double-sided use could not be read on a single-sided drive.
The disks were Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) coded in 512-byte sectors, and were soft-sectored. They contained 40 tracks per side at the 48 track per inch (TPI) density, and initially were formatted to contain eight sectors per track. This meant that SSDD disks initially had a formatted capacity of 160 kB, operating system was later updated to allow formatting the disks with nine sectors per track. This yielded a formatted capacity of 180 kB with SSDD disks while DSDD disks had a capacity of 320 kB. However, the DOS /drives, and 360 kB with DSDD disks/drives. The unformatted capacity of the floppy disks was advertised as "250KB" for SSDD and "500KB" for DSDD ("KB" ambiguously referring to either 1000 or 1024 bytes; essentially the same for rounded-off values), however these "raw" 250/500 kB were not the same thing as the usable formatted capacity; under DOS, the maximum capacity for SSDD and DSDD disks was 180 kB and 360 kB, respectively. Regardless of type, the file system of all floppy disks (under DOS) was FAT12.
While the SSDD drives initially were the only floppy drives available for the model 5150 PC, IBM later switched to DSDD drives, and the majority of 5150 PCs sold eventually shipped with one or two DSDD drives. The 5150's successor, the model 5160 IBM XT, never shipped with SSDD drives; it generally had one double-sided 360 kB drive (next to its internal hard disk). While it was technically possible to retrofit more advanced floppy drives such as the high-density drive (released in 1984) into the original IBM PC, this was not an option offered by IBM for the 5150 model, and the move to high-density 5.25-inch floppies in particular was notoriously fraught with disk compatibility problems.
IBM's original floppy disk controller card also included an external 37-pin D-shell connector. This allowed users to connect additional external floppy drives by third party vendors. IBM themselves did not offer external floppy drives.
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