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	Floppy disk is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.
	This article appeared on Misplaced Pages's Main Page as Today's featured article on May 13, 2004.
Article milestones Date Process Result May 4, 2004 Featured article candidate Promoted December 23, 2006 Featured article review Demoted
Current status: Former featured article

Dr. Mackintosh Relevance

I question the relevance and accuracy of the Dr. Mackintosh attribution. With regard to relevance, it is not clear that this has much to do with the article, it is but one of many test products used in magnetic disk recording, flexible and rigid. So absent a citation I question relevance. With regard to accuracy, while Mackintosh did publish a paper on phase margin analysis in 1981 it referenced a paper by Katz and Huber from 1979. The paper in turn was the theoretical justification of the experimental phase margin analayses done by Mike Monnet at Memorex in the late 70's. Monnett became the vendor of the Monnett Phase Margin analyzer. The industry then became dominated by Guzik, another Memorex alumni from the 1970's. All of which suggests the Mackintosh attribution is also not very accurate. I'd like to hear some arguments why this shouldn't be dropped. Tom94022 06:05, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Due to the very high variability in quality, Burroughs (and everyone else!) had great difficulty getting a consistent enough media for DSSD and 1MB DSDD. We had yields on DSDD media averaging 20%, with batches occasionally yielding only a few disks. We built a Phase Margin Analyzer built on a design I had done to test HDD at ICL in 1970/1972. The original HDD unit had used ECL logic, but the slow data rate of the floppy allowed us to build it with TTL. This allowed non-destructive, full-surface testing of 100% of disks, and then batch testing as production processes stabilized. We gave copies of the PMA unit to several of our disk vendors, without restraint on use or duplication, as a way to get out of a difficult supply problem. The PMA had a major positive impact on the viability of floppy disks. Nigel Mackintosh worked for me on a number of data channel issues, including the PMA system. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.23.186.184 (talk) 00:32, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

With all due respect Jim, I would like to see some independent verification of Burroughs's contribution to PMA by a floppy disk manufacturer such as Dysan or 3M. I have no such recollections nor can I find any independent confirming material. So I continue to suggest this whole topic be dropped. Tom94022 (talk) 01:24, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Reliability and Error Correction

Am I the only one who's over a decade of floppy disk usage, experienced how crappy this media was (compared to newer formats)? I'm talking in the narrow sense of reliability (and the mental stress associated with it). Whenever you transferred files with floppies, you had to pray, but usually that didn't help; one out of every 8 disks or so had an error in it, which made software installation a nightmare. My college used zip drives until 2006, and from about 400 disks a year, 10-25% always died (showed read/write errors).
Isn't this worth mentioning, at least in the reasons the contributed to flash drives phasing out floppies? Binba (talk) 05:36, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I began using floppies in the mid 1980s. Fresh 5.25" double-density disks seemed very reliable. I very rarely had one go bad. I never made any significant use of 1.2M 5.25" disks. When 1.44M disks came out, I would regularly get one or two in a box that were dead on arrival. Once past infant mortality, regular floppies very rarely gave me problems. Zip disks, on the other hand, were a constant source of trouble. After being bit by the click of death a couple times, I got rid of my Zip drive. Frotz (talk) 06:29, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

It probably depends upon (1) the quality of media you used and (2) how much data you tried to "squeeze" on the floppy. My first computer was a Commodore 64 that stored 340 kilobytes on a double-sided disk. My second was a Commodore Amiga at 800 kilobytes. Never had a problem since the data density on these machines was so low, that the disc was barely being taxed. (There was one time were I bought cheapy 10 cent discs; they failed to format; never made that mistake again.) (As long as I bought name-brands like Maxell, I was happy and error-free.) ----- I later upgraded to 1.4 megabyte discs which I swapped between Macintosh and IBM PC..... again, never had a problem.

I still use floppies even today (to back-up important documents) (or transport documents to Kinkos/Staples, which lack email access). I've never owned a USB key drive. Never felt the need to own one. ----- The floppy disk died for essentially the same reason 56k modems died: Internet-downloadable videos. You can't download videos over a 56k modem* because the bandwidth is too small; likewise you can't store videos on a floppy because the space is too small. Prior to the existence of downloadable videos, the floppy was great for storing programs and/or documents, but now that people need to be able to download & store ~350 megabyte TV episodes, the 56k modem and floppy just don't fit the need. ----- It was downloadable video, television, and movies that led to the need for high-speed internet and high-capacity drives, not floppy reliability.

(*Aside - I actually have downloaded videos using a 56k modem. It takes approximately 20 hours for each television episode. I was stuck in a hotel for 1/2 year with no access to anything but the phone line (out-of-town work assignment). I was very happy to get out of that hotel, and back home to my fast DSL connection.) - Theaveng (talk) 22:43, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that videos are what made the floppy irrelvant, what happened is that documents became too large to fit on floppies. I just took a look at the media guide for a college football team - a 250 page PDF file, and it was 12 megabytes. The data files just outstripped the capacity of the floppy.--RLent (talk) 22:32, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Gotta disagree. There are more-advanced floppies that could hold that 12 megabyte file. And with room to spare. ----- What they can not hold are 350 megabyte videos; the advent of video outstripped the growth in storage media (even hard drives are taxed; I filled-up a 1/2 terabyte drive in just a few weeks). ---- Theaveng (talk) 17:24, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Gotta agree that software distribution killed floppies. The issues were media cost and drive cost! A 12 MByte or 100 MByte (think ZIP drive) flexible medium was not and could not be cost effective compared to the pressed CD-ROM medium and such drives were not and could be not cost effective compared to the CD-ROM drive. ZIP showed flexible magnetic media could get to 200 MByte but neither its drive cost nor its media cost ever got close to CD. Tom94022 (talk) 18:59, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm happy to see at least a small mention of the reliablity problem. I'm trying to gether information about how many people experienced the extremely low reliablity of floppies. I used them growing up in the 90's and my numbers were closer to 9 out of 10 floppies would not work at all. I have done some tests of my own, buying different brands and using them in different drives; but for me i never had a floppy disk last very long at all. I could copy a small text file onto a new disk, carry it 1 foot to another computer, and more than 8 times out of 10 the file would not read. I've seem some mentions of this on Slashdot but i havn't been able to find any reliable information. On the other hand, i know people who had the same floppy disk in a backpack for 4 years and never experienced a single error (until i touched it of course - then it died immediatly). --Quasar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.133.100.133 (talk) 20:38, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand what ye do to your floppies? I've got old Commodore floppies from the 80s that still work fine (just this past weekend I was playing Pirates off a 5 1/4" disk). And I have old Macintosh/IBM floppies that still hold my school work from the mid-90s. They've stood the test of time. ----- I guess if you "store" your floppies by tossing them on the floor, or throwing them inside books, or stapling them to notebooks... then yeah, they will fail. But if you take care of floppies by storing them inside a hard case, then they will last longer than some of today's CD-Rs (which lose their ink & fade, thus erasing the data). ---- Theaveng (talk) 17:24, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Agree, my floppies continue to be quite reliable. A few months ago I booted MSDOS 3.3 from both 5 1/4" and 3.5" FDs; the disks had to be 10 years old. I have some 8" FD's and I expect they would work except I can't find a drive Tom94022 (talk) 18:59, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Ford Motor Company developed their own 3.5" floppy disks due to the reliability problems with the off the shelf disks. A selling point of The Sealed Hard Disk was reliability over the easily dirt damaged and constant head contact wear of floppies.

An unused floppy drive is more unreliable than ever just from dust buildup in the unit. First disk put into it is used to clean the dust off the heads and usually ruins that floppy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Holidaypepsi (talk • contribs) 03:00, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I'll add a voice to the argument that it's probably down to declining manufacturing standards, as they can't afford to use best quality materials or throw away too many discs at the QC stage as nowhere near as many are sold any more (since the coming of CDROM, despite continued use as a document-transfer medium), so a lot of marginal stock is being let through... they work OK to pass minimum standards, but it's almost guaranteed they'll keel over before long. But those that do survive will probably survive quite a long time - a notably large proportion of my older discs still function fine, and back when I was using them as main storage (HD-less Atari ST) and they were being manufactured in great bulk for lower data density (DSDD) applications, I can only remember two or three ever failing or giving serious disc errors - certainly we rarely reformatted or outright threw a disc away, and the death of one was an event of note as it usually meant the total loss of a cherished program or set of documents. Blanks were expensive and precious for one thing! Our large-seeming library only ever grew to about 350 discs absolute maximum (or, less than 250mb)... so that's a failure rate of maybe 1 in 100 over several years of quite heavy and heartless use. Whereas I can certainly sympathise with the atrocious reliability of more recently purchased DSHDs - even vs early/mid 90s examples with the same data density. They're roughly equivalent to frisbees in terms of guaranteed data retention.

I can finally appreciate the "dust build up" comment now, having pulled my PSX out of its ad-hoc storage (under the TV cabinet) for the first time in a couple years because a small visiting cousin wanted "GAME!" and it was easier to drag that out and scrounge a TV cable from my brother than mess around importing anything more up to date into the lounge. Nothing would work at first, it crashed hard on loading some discs, and refused to load others at all - until a good few lungfuls of air were sent over the laser head (and it was rubbed with a soft cloth) and through the innards of the beast for good luck. After that, it was perfect (well, as perfect as a 10-year old console with a 2x CD drive can be) ... good job CDROM is a non-contact medium, unlike floppy!

And, again, don't confuse floppies with Zip Discs. They do use superficially the same technology, but there's whole other layers of servo control etc on top, and the click death is a unique and conceptually horrific (and unforseeable) iomega idiosyncracy, that I was unlucky enough to eventually suffer myself (though thankfully, only mildly, and I was able to recover all my Zip-stored files onto our newly bought 4x CDRW drive before the drive failed completely and I disassembled it for shits and giggles - seven 9.95 zip 100's onto a single 3.99 CDR, it seemed so cheap!) ... but it's no arguing point from which to base any judgements on the soundness or otherwise of standard microfloppies. By the way, I would consider 400 Zips a year is an INCREDIBLY heavy usage (some people live on less money than the purchasing of all those represent!) and it's amazing the drive was functioning at all after a single 12 month cycle of that :D Given the way click death propagates and it's propensity for "infecting" previously sound discs and drives, 25% failure rate is possibly encouragingly low. Until this error came to the fore, however, I'd been using the same Zip drive and slowly-growing library of discs for several perfectly happy years - it was a very nice and elegant bridge format between floppy and CDRW as far as I was concerned, and still has some advantages over CDRW (near-instant access, near-universal drive portability, physical robustness) that have only recently been taken up by 128mb+ USB keys. PS, some places e.g. community colleges, small schools still use floppies for students to save their work on, as you can cram a good number of simple Word and Excel documents onto a single floppy, and use one disc per Powerpoint / DTP project if they limit the graphics. They're reliable enough for this so long as you remember to treat them with respect and keep the most recent copy also saved on the local HD or your shared user drive via the PC you're working on, and basically just use the floppy as convenience data transfer (vs emailing as an attachment, particularly if "home" doesn't have internet or only has slow, expensive dial-up) rather than primary storage. My teacher mother still keeps a small plastic lever-arch folder insert with discs and a USB drive for this reason and they seem to work just fine. They worked less fine for the distressingly careless students of the CC I worked at who'd often end up clamouring for recovery service (hard to provide without taking it home and pulling a relic laptop out of the cupboard - Win2k/XP's scandisc is brutally castrated compared to 9x/DOS) and wonder why you looked at them disparagingly and warned them "I'm sorry, I'll give it my best shot but you'd better accept it's probably done for" when presented with a disc covered in glittery stickers, very heavily ballpoint-written labels, unidentifiable grime and the shutter half hanging off, pulled out of a pocket also housing a mobile phone blaring tinny music. (Did they ever backup to their user drive before hitting Save -> A:\My Final Project.PPT, or keep a copy on hard disc at home? Did they hell.) 82.46.180.56 (talk) 04:14, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Other "standard" 3.5 formats

A significant number of 2.5" disks were labelled as 2M, not 1.44. Standard DOS could not format at more than 1.44 meg per disk. However, standard drives could read and write this format, and DOS could with special drivers. Windows 95 was distributed in such a manner: the first 1.44M disk loaded the drivers, and the CAB files were stored on 1.7 M formatted floppies. This reduced the number of disks required and prevented very casual copying.

Do you mean 3.5"? :)

On a rather more convincing note than old memmories, Linux supports these various modes. This page gives some details, but not device numbers. Note the fd0H1760 device. This is the 1.7M format used by Windows 95 install disks and apparently works on any normal 1.44M floppy drive. The fd0H1920 works with those disks labelled as 2.0M and also works on any normal floppy drive. These are not the same as the extra density which needed better drives.128.165.207.90 (talk) 20:05, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

DOS / Windows utilities, such as "2M", are also available to allow experimental user reformatting of DSHD floppies upto and including a 2.2mb maxi-format, though the makers recommend going no further than the preset MS-distribution-like 1.68 / 1.82mb modes, and sticking to the bog standard size if you can at all manage it, using the custom formatter instead to create discs with "fast loading" skewed sectors (running up to 3x faster in some cases, allegedly... can't say as it was THAT quick, but there was some improvement). I've used it with some success to make a fast-loading 1.68mb DOS 7 boot disc with a couple extra drivers and utilities than would otherwise fit, but I can't speak for the protracted reliability or longevity of this tactic as it's naturally been quite a while since that disc was used! 82.46.180.56 (talk) 04:50, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

My Alps Floppy drive is unable to read disks, which were formatted with more than 1.68MB by the same drive (I haven't tried formqatting them w/ other drives). I think, the reason for this is, that these formats are not standard, so some 1.44MB-drives cannot read the extra tracks. --MrBurns (talk) 22:05, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

SS/DD

i'm almost certain the aphorism 'same shit, different day' originated as a backronym for SS/DD. it used to be a bumper sticker. oes anyone have a citation?

I did think this at one time, but it's more than likely just a case of convergent acronym evolution, of which there are more than enough other existing examples. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.46.180.56 (talk) 04:36, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Trivia

This section was removed because, and excuse me because there is no other way to put this, the biggest load of completely useless crap I've ever seen in an article. I think only one piece of it, if any, was cited, and most of it doesn't belong in an article in the first place. If anyone is wondering why this article lost its FA status its useless crap like that.--Oni Ookami Alfador 02:09, 11 January 2008 (UTC) Note: Any additions as "trivia" that are not properly cited will be removed. --Oni Ookami Alfador 02:15, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

You could perhaps be a bit tactful about this. Your tone suggests to me that you have an axe to grind. Frotz (talk) 03:25, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I say that somebody (perhaps Oni) should NOT delete the section, but instead incorporate the various bits'n'pieces into the main article. *I* personally see lots of useful information in the Trivia section, and I don't want to see it randomly thrown away. We will regret that loss later on. ---- Theaveng (talk) 11:55, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I just finished merging most of the trivia section into the main article. Dear Oni: THAT is how you deal with a problem, not the way you did it. I put a warning on your page (and reported you to the mods) because what you were doing was vandalism. You should never delete 19 paragraphs of information without first getting consensus via the Talk page. ------ I see on your User page that you DGAF ("This user frequently does not give a fuck.") which is a poor attitude to have on wikipedia, which is supposed to be a *cooperative* venture. A better approach is to follow the advice given by wikipedia: "TRIVIA: The article could be improved by integrating relevant items." Note it says nothing about deleting one-quarter of the article. ---- Theaveng (talk) 12:14, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I removed it to avoid exactly what you did. Combine a bunch of untrue, uncited, or otherwise unsubstantiated CRAP into the the article. For Christ's sake I'd think after whining so much about it you'd put at least enough effort into it to pick out the things that actually have citations. --Oni Ookami Alfador 14:45, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

That's it. Using the phrase "for christ's sake" is highly, highly offensive to my religious beliefs. I am DONE. If this is the quality of work wikipedia allows in their encyclopedia, it's no wonder college professors say wikipedia is not a valid reference. ---- Theaveng (talk) 15:53, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

P.S. I put a lot of time in this article, and for what? To have it destroyed by a single person who loves to click the DELETE key????? Ridiculous. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Theaveng (talk • contribs) 16:21, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Before things get emotionally carried away, I agree that most of the material in the trivia section was unreferences WP:OR. Even the merits of integrating the remaining Blue Monday statement is highly debateable. And Theaven, that's incorrect about the trivia tag. It clearly states "The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones." --Marty Goldberg (talk) 16:27, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

(EDIT CONFLICT)Please read WP:OWN. When you add content to Misplaced Pages you should expect to have it edited relentlessly. It is unfortunate that people put time into an article where the content or article itself may be deleted or changed radically, but the amount of time and effort someone puts in has no bearing on what content meets criteria for inclusion and what content should be altered or removed. I apologize if my euphemism offends you, however, Misplaced Pages is not censored. There are many people with varying religious beliefs and methods editing here and if you get offended every time something so innocent is said I would expect that you are going to have some difficulties getting along with people. --Oni Ookami Alfador 16:29, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I am only objecting that you are deleting 19 paragraphs of info. If it had been just one paragraph, okay, but 19 is a bit excessive. (IMHO almost as bad as those persons who enjoy blanking an entire article.) ---- Theaveng (talk) 16:41, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

The info being removed was uncited WP:OR, also filled with WP:AWT material. "On disks with the cover bending away the best option is to rip the cover off ....." is instructional, in a similar veign to strategy guides for games, which does not meet Misplaced Pages standads for content. "There were many people in the 1990s and still some in the 2000s who are not as familiar with computers ...." is pure WP:OR and filled with weasel words. Etc. etc. for the other material. Likewise, you were also repeatedly removing valid reference request tags. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 16:50, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

PROPOSAL- split section History to History of floppy disk

This section is getting rather long. It may be helpful to have a high level summary regarding the history of the floppy disk and floppy drive, while leaving the details to a separate page.

I'd also like to see a reduction in the amount of chatter regarding technical specifications as the format evolved. Lets talk about the people, the companies and the reasons why things happened as they did. If we want to include details, lets hotlink to the floppy disk format page instead. Dinjiin (talk) 22:34, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I like your idea of hot-linking to the floppy disk format page. I don't agree with your other proposals. Instead of moving stuff to another article, I prefer to see it shortened. In other words, instead of talking about EVERY floppy 3.4", 3.0", or whatever, just shorten that to "Other proposed standards included Sony 3.0", Philips 3.4", .... but none of these met with any success." If someone really feels the need to discuss Philips 3.4" floppies, they can create a separate page like the Philips Video 2000 page rather than bog down this article. ---- Theaveng (talk) 11:35, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I do agree that we should clear out much regarding the failed formats. It seems that this page has become a haven for such oddball and underdog formats. Having said that, it would seem inconsistent to create dedicated pages (which would most likely end up being stubs) for these failed formats when more popular formats are lumped into one page. Besides, if you go that route, you will see people clamoring for specific articles just for the 8-inch, 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch formats. Given the amount of repetitive data, I think such a direction would be a very bad thing. Well defined subsections for major formats and a small subsection just for less formats would be more appropriate. Dinjiin (talk) 21:04, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I didn't say we should create "stub" articles for the failed format. I said if one particular user, for whatever reason was in love with 3.4" failed floppies, then THEY could create the stub article. (As happened with Video 2000.) Not us. ----- Maybe the best way for me to make you understand my point is to just demonstrate it. Off to the editing window I go.  ;-) ---- Theaveng (talk) 13:24, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I understand the direction you're going, and I'm sorry for writing as if you would be doing the work. From what I gather, you would like to see unique articles for specific disk formats, much like how the video storage category is setup, especially for less common formats so that we can de-clutter the main page. My major worries are that ...A) articles for less common formats will end up as stubs ...B) somebody will come along and start breaking out major formats as well ...C) much of the data within those articles will be redundant in nature ...D) they will be written in an inconstant tone and style ...E) it'll be harder to watch and review all of those pages as opposed to a few and ...F) you'll end up with comparison pages, like the 8" disk format page, anyways because people tend to like data in one place. - I've been working on some draft ideas, so maybe I should toss 'em in a sandbox for review as well. Dinjiin (talk) 02:31, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Nope. You're still not understanding. I don't want to see ANY unique articles for the failed formats. I think they belong in the trashbin of history, and don't deserve more than a second's consideration. (Personally I'd like to see the Video 2000 article disappear too, but there are a lot of vocal fans who want to keep it.) What people do with sub-articles; it matters not to me. I'm betting there won't be any sub-articles to worry about (because I doubt anyone cares enough about some old 70s floppy to create a sub-article). ---- Theaveng (talk) 11:33, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

So Misplaced Pages should only be for things that are successful and current? Fail. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.46.180.56 (talk) 04:46, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I have to say that I don't agree with any of the proposals for deletion of content. It all fits in there nicely as it is for the history of the floppy disk, to delete any of the established content would be an amateurish move of epic proportions. JayKeaton (talk) 05:02, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

"Amateurish" is to hold onto information that should be thrown out as irrelevant. A good editor knows when to press the "delete" key and erase extraneous info that's not needed. In this case, the reader does not need to know (or care about) old floppy formats that were stillborn. --- Theaveng (talk) 15:08, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Seconded. I see no reason to delete sourcable material. Each one of these formats has a history that can be referenced and sourced. Celarnor 04:52, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

May I suggest the article should focus on mainstream products and include in its body neither secondary drive products, nor secondary drive form factors nor deviant formats of a mainstream form factor. Until the advent of LSI floppy controllers the formatted capacity more or less was a systems manufacturer's decision. Most people followed IBM's formats for 8" but it was the wild west for 5.25" until the market picked a winner. It was somewhat less chaotic for 3.5", partially due to the beginning of LSI controllers and partially due to the industry realizing the needs for standards. Personally, I don't think every flexible media device belongs in an article on Floppy Disks - yes their media was flexible, but for the most part they were never rose high enough in the publics awareness to be thought of as a Floppy Disk so including them in the article is TMI and only adds to length and confusion. That is not to say they shouldn't be mentioned but perhaps only a statement that "Other flexible media devices include ... ". The resulting article would have the following content.

The only drive form factors discussed in the article should be the 8" 1S, 2S & 2D, 5.25" SSSD, DSSD & DSDD and the MIC 3.5" DD, HD and the ED.

There should be a link to one page for each of the three form factors listing all the technical details of all its formats, mainstream and secondary.

Everything else goes into separate articles or footnotes, floptical, the original Sony 3.5", LS-120, Apple's variant 5.25", Burroughs 8", Dr. Nats, etc

Such an approach should allow one shorter but more relevant article without loss of anything. Tom94022 (talk) 18:37, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

We need to remember one thing here: although we are talking about a floppy disk we are not limited by the space of a single floppy disk. Furthermore we are talking about an obsolete museum piece of equipment. In the museum context more information is better. If all this article talked about was the 1.44MB HD floppy and nothing else, well most people already know about that AKA 100% useless info to them. But it would be short useless info! Now reading about all the flavors from 8” on down and the how and why of the disk is interesting. Different devices that attempted to overcome the floppy need or improve it are of interest.

Splitting the article up is also a bad idea. Look at the X-10 write up, lots more info on it’s own page, but no mention of it in the main article anywhere esp. under speed. If you were to read the article and attempt to answer the question “Did anyone ever do anything about the slowness of the damn things?” Your answer would be software or a different device like a zip. Only an autoloader could be hardware related faster. Totally missing the X-10 attempt to speed them up. Speed of computers is of course the last thing that is thought of. (Unless it is MHZ on the CPU.)

So the article is long – SO WHAT? You can justify it because of it’s long history and still being in use today. If not you are in the wrong place and need to get your information from a sanitized and shortened article elsewhere. A sign on a wall maybe... Holidaypepsi (talk) 21:31, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Not withstanding all of the above discussion Alan Liefting (talk) moved the entire history section into its own article. I reverted his change. I continue to believe that if we want to shorten the article we should take all of the non-mainstream floppy stuff out of the article and put them in separate articles, example all of the so-called Floppy Replacements really have nothing to do with the floppy disks. In any event, such a major change should not be made without consensus and as I read the above (and below), there is no consensus. Tom94022 (talk) 18:29, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Re: Drive Letter part of Background

The assigning of drive designators, A:, B:, df0 is an OS function and I question whether it ought to be in the FDD article at all. Furthermore the section is not too accurate, it sort of mixes up DOS and UNIX without being too clear about who does what assignments and what choices there are. Example: in MSDOS the FDD at physical location 0 on the FDD cable is A:, no choice. Other systems do it different ways and change over time. I propose striking the entire paragraph, perhaps just leaving a simple single sentence along the lines that one should look to the specific OS for information has to how a system addresses and accesses a FDD Tom94022 (talk) 08:27, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Just to make the situation more complex, Atari 16-bit computers followed the DOS convention (main internal drive A:, secondary external floppy B:, then any hard discs, ROM cartridges, or ASCI DMA (SCSI-like) storage devices (CDROM, Zip etc) being C: upwards ... in fact carts were lowercase c: and could co-exist with hard disc C:, to make it worse) ... Macintosh clearly went off in it's own direction ... C64 had you accessing the drive hardware address directly ... and I totally don't know what the Amiga and Acorn did, but I bet it's even wierder. Best to leave it out, other than maybe the briefest of footnotes saying that e.g. they're typically A: and B: in PC systems or df0 in Unix, hence hard discs not starting as the lowest-number/letter devices, with other systems using still different arrangements... given that this is supposed to be an article about the media format itself more than anything. 82.46.180.56 (talk) 04:42, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Commodore Amiga used abbreviations: df = disk floppy and dh = disk hard, so you'd have dh0: dh1: df0: df1: as your designations. Other possibilities were ram: for tempory storage of files and prt: to dump a file directly to the printer. ---- Theaveng (talk) 13:22, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

History split

I made a separate article about it and was wondering if i should erase the part of this article that I copied to 8- inch floppy disc. Also, is this plagerism or not because I copied it from this article and made a whole new one. Although the whole thing is just the same; Wikpedia. I only did it because there was a note when I edited this article saying it was 84 KB long and if someone could split it so I did. is this OK?

Tired, --RayquazaDialgaWeird2210 (talk) 17:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I believe there's no problem copying/pasting that stuff into a new 8-inch floppy article and deleting what you copied from the original article, but two notes come to mind:

1. Remember to write a brief entry on the 8-inch where it was originally and include a link to the 8-inch floppy article.
2. I think one of the bigger problems may be notability. Why is the 8-inch so important as to deserve its own article? Personally, sure, I have no problem with it, but other editors may disagree. Casull 23:06, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

It seems strange to make a separate article about the 8" FDD since it was the first in a continuum. Also, as near as I can tell you haven't added much additional material. Finally, I note the whole history section is being considered as a separate section (which I oppose) so copying one section doesn't seem to make much sense. Why did you do it?

If you are trying to simplify the article, it would seem more appropriate to pull the many flexible media devices out to their own articles, for example, all of the so called Floppy replacements were never, close to capable of replacing floppy disks. Tom94022 (talk) 03:46, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

As the "proposed split" tag suggested, it should really be the entire History section that should be considered for a possible split. I've shifted the tagging accordingly. Feel free to chime in, anyone. If this goes unanswered for another few days I think we can just perform the split. It would really cut down this very long article nicely, I think. Equazcion •✗/C • 03:33, 28 Apr 2008 (UTC)

I oppose splitting history from the article. There are other and better ways to shorten the article, such as, pulling all the non-mainstream material out into separate articles. Tom94022 (talk) 03:59, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Thickness

I'm missing information on the thickness of e.g the Sony 3.5" disk. This would be useful for comparision. e.g: "storage capacity of a DVD equals a stack of floppies X cm high." EverGreg (talk) 15:04, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

According to ECMA-100, the thickness is 3.3 mm Tom94022 (talk) 19:52, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! :) EverGreg (talk) 19:14, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Eclipse

I read note 34 and it didn't seem to say that floppy discs did not offer protection, only that the quality of the image was pretty poor. Change it? --58.104.192.231 (talk) 03:40, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Port

Hi! I have a question: a typical floppy drive connects to what type of port? (Serial, Parallel etc.) If I want to connect it to a serial/parallel port, do I need an adapter?--18jahremädchen (talk) 11:53, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Except for USB and SCSI floppy drives (SUN Microsystems used 1.44M SCSI drives in many of their SparcStation systems), they connect to a floppy port. The signaling and control system used by the PC was the most common, also used by many of the 1980's micro and home computers and still present on almost all PC (x86 CPU) motherboards. Apple's computers always used a proprietary interface with fewer wires than the PC style. Commodore's drives (the 15xx series) didn't use an interface, they used a separate computer in the housing, directly controlling the drive mechanism and communicating with the computer via a serial cable. Amiga drives used their own proprietary system, but there is a simple method to connect an Amiga drive to a PC's parallel port for 'ripping' entire disks to one of the disk image formats. This cannot be used for writing Amiga disks, not without more complex electronics and special software. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 21:24, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

8-inch DSDD vs DSSD Capacity

The Disk formats table says the 8" DSDD capacity was 1.2MB, 20% more than twice the capacity of DSSD. I think the 1.2MB figure refers to MS-DOS 2.11 formatting. I suspect this inconsistency in the table is because DSSD was a short-lived product line whereas DSDD had a long life into the mid-1980s during which MS-DOS became the predominant format. When DSDD was formatted under CP/M-80 (e.g. on the Xerox 820) the DSDD capacity was c. 980 KB). - Pointillist (talk) 01:08, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

• I've checked this and corrected the Disk formats table. - Pointillist (talk) 01:25, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Tape backups

The article doesn't mention any of the multitude of tape backup drives that used the PC style floppy controller interface. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 21:25, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Yet more formats and software

Microsoft's DMF disks could be copied using a combination of the DOS programs FDFORMAT (to make blank 1.68M disks) and COPYQM to copy the originals. SH-CopyStar (still available here http://lars-schenk.com/history/1994-sh-copystar )could also be used to create the blank disks, as well as even higher capacity disks by adding more than the standard number of tracks and/or sectors. IBM used a 1.72M XDF or Extended Density Format for the distribution disks for OS/2 Warp 3.0. That version of OS/2 included a utility for making backup copies and the user manual strongly urged the user to make backups before installing OS/2. (Totally contrary to Microsoft policy with Windows 95 where you had to buy another copy of the disks should they get damaged.) The utility could be used to create blank XDF disks, which were useless because OS/2 3.0 was incapable of writing to that format. (My personal experience with OS/2 Warp 3.0 installed from floppies.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 22:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Current availability

Is there any solution for using 5.25" floppies on a modern PC? It seems to me like nearly if not all the 5.25" drives ever built used the old slot-card interface which motherboards have not carried since the time of the 486. It doesn't seem like anyone has manufactured an external solution either. I've seen some people make their own hardware hacks but that's neither here nor there. What options does the average user have if they want to access an old library of 5.25" floppies with their current PC? Ham Pastrami (talk) 02:14, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

5.25" floppy drive will generally work in any system that supports a 3.5" floppy. Motherboard-side connectors are the same and the only difference is the the connector on the drive side - you need a proper cable. That's it. --Aleksandar Šušnjar (talk) 02:43, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you mean. The picture of the cable on this page is pretty self-explanatory. If someone can make a freely licensed equivalent I'd consider adding it to the article. Ham Pastrami (talk) 05:59, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Error in Measurements? for instance the 3½-inch floppy, which is actually 90 mm) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.104.110.234 (talk) 06:11, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Kibibytes, and so on

• Contended revert:

This editor made an edit which I felt had numerous problems. Attempting to follow best editing practice, I improved upon rather than reverted their edit. This editor has restored their preferred version of the text containing all of the original problems:-

1. The term "kilo-kibibytes" is (as far as I know) original research and has never been published;
2. The revert replaced MoS-compliant multiplication symbols with the * symbol (which only means multiply in certain computer languages) and removed non-breaking spaces from around those symbols;
3. The Manual of Style Misplaced Pages:MOSNUM#Quantities_of_bytes_and_bits refers to "binary" and "decimal" schemes, not "Base 2" and "Base 10".
4. The edit contained some unsourced editorialising to the effect that non-SI units are "confusing" and "incorrect".
5. The terms "kibibytes" and "mebibytes" have rarely if ever been used to describe floppy disk capacities, and particularly not by disk manufacturers on packaging or disks. The MoS has the following guidelines regarding these terms:

In short, I believe the change to have been incorrect in every major respect. Rather than edit-warring, I would like to hear other editors' opinions on the subject. Having established a consensus, hopefully we can move forward with the best version of the text. SHEFFIELDSTEEL 17:47, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

1. Kilo-kibibytes is NOT original research. Kilo is defined by the SI metric system as "1000" and "kibi" is defined as "1024". This is strictly defined, and I am using it in that fashion. A floppy is 1.44 × 1000 × 1024 bytes. That's 1.44 × kilo × kibi × bytes per metric usage. Basic math.

2. I apologize that I erased your multiplication symbols with *. It was not intentional. Honestly I didn't even notice the × symbol had been added, else I would have kept it.

3. "Binary" means base 2. "Decimal" means base 10. This too is a strictly defined mathematical standard, and my usage was correct. As for the manual of style, it's a *guideline* not a strait-jacket and allows authors to adjust usage, especially when referring to math and trying to explain complex ideas to non-mathematical readers.

4. Actually what I said was that "1.44MB is confusing for users" because it is an incorrect label. (The correct capacity is either 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB, not 1.44.)

5. "Rarely used" is not the same as never. The 1970s and 80s-era floppies are a case where manufacturers DID use kibibytes, sometimes erroneously (see points 4 and 1).

The reason I reverted your edit is because it failed to explain what 1.44 MB means on floppies, and it should be explained in the article. I consider it especially important to point-out to readers that the 1.44 MB imprint is NOT CORRECT. If you can think of a better way to explain it, that's fine with me, but to erase it completely is a mistake IMHO. ---- Theaveng (talk) 23:41, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Why use kilo-kibibytes in preference to, for example, kibi-kilobytes? Does any reliable source use either unit? If not, the term is original research. Similarly, unless a source is provided showing that manufacturers used the term "kibibytes" in labelling floppy disks, it's original research to say that they did. I've rewritten the paragraph to, again, remove the "kibi" units as recommended by the Manual of Style, and I've added a link to Megabyte where the various definitions are documented. SHEFFIELDSTEEL 20:01, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

kibi-kilobytes would be incorrect usage, since the floppy disks do not use kilobytes (1000 bytes). ---- Theaveng (talk) 12:00, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

You seem to have repeatedly missed the point. Let me try to make it clearer.

The terms "kibibytes" and "mebibytes" should not be used.

I've given reasons for this already, based on the Manual of Style and our policy on original research. I have provided several versions of the text that comply with the relevant guidelines and policies. If you wish to attempt to rewrite this section again, please do so in accordance with policy and guidelines - in other words, without using these units. Thank you. SHEFFIELDSTEEL 14:15, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Control your anger. The Manual of Style also reads: "Consistency within each article is desirable, but the need for consistency may be balanced with other considerations." And: Where consistency is not possible, specify wherever there is a deviation from the primary definition," which I have done. In this case, because floppy sectors are divided into base 2 multiples, the use of base 2 terminology like "kibi" or "mebi" is appropriate.

Also your edit "either 1.41 MB or 1.47 MB" makes no sense. A disk can't be both 1.41 megabytes and 1.47 megabytes at the same time. It's an impossibility. ---- Theaveng (talk) 15:52, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

(un-dent)My anger is fully under control, thank you, and has been throughout. My use of bold text was not an attempt to express frustration but to communicate clearly a point which you have, apparently, repeatedly failed to grasp.

• The Manual of Style says: "KB may be used in a decimal or binary sense... do not use kibibyte unless the sources do."
• User Theaveng says: "we should use kibibyte because the unit is being used in a binary sense."

As "other considerations" go, that one looks particularly weak to me. I could continue to revert your changes to attempt to resolve further the problems that your changes have introduced, but will instead await a third opinion on the subject. SHEFFIELDSTEEL 16:49, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Do you have any evidence that there is consensus for the wording you quote from WP:MOSNUM? Thunderbird2 (talk) 17:40, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

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