Floppy Disk Variants - Standard Floppy Replacements

Standard Floppy Replacements

Through the early 1990s a number of attempts were made by various companies to introduce newer floppy-like formats based on the now-universal 3½-inch physical format. Most of these systems provided the ability to read and write standard DD and HD disks, while at the same time introducing a much higher-capacity format as well. None of these ever reached the point where it could be assumed that every current PC would have one, and they have now largely been replaced by CD and DVD burners and USB flash drives. Nevertheless, the 5¼ and 3½-inch sizes remain to this day as the standard for drive bays in computer cases, the former used for CD and DVD (including Blu-ray), and the latter for hard disk drives.

The main technological change for the higher-capacity formats was the addition of tracking information on the disk surface to allow the read/write heads to be positioned more accurately. Normal disks have no such information, so the drives use the tracks themselves with a feedback loop in order to center themselves. The newer systems generally used marks burned onto the surface of the disk to find the tracks, allowing the track width to be greatly reduced.