What Is the Capacity of a Floppy Disc?

A flopy disc

Floppy disks are data storage devices that appeared in the 1970s. When IBM first produced them, they came in flexible packaging. Even though they come in hard packaging now--usually 3.5 square-inch cases--the term "floppy" is still used.

Composition and Use

A floppy disk is made up of a thin sheet of magnetic plastic covered by a sheet of nonmagnetic plastic. Data on a floppy disk can be erased, and the disk can be used again. To be used, a floppy disk requires a floppy disk drive. The capacity of a floppy disk depends on the density of the material of which it's made.

Double-Density Disks

Double-density floppy disk are the less-dense sort of disks, in spite of their name. They can store up to 800 KB (kilobytes) of data.

High-Density Disks

High-density disks offer more storage capacity than double-density disks. They can store up to 1.44 MG (megabytes) of data.

Metrics

Computer storage is measured in bytes. A kilobyte is equal to 1,024 bytes. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes bytes. Thus a high-density disk stores more than 1,000 times more data than a double-density disk.

References

• University of Tennessee: Johnny Pham Homepage: Floppy Disks
• Raymond Walters College: Disk Geometry
• New Mexico State University: Floppy Disks