3.5 inch floppy disk
This format was designed to be smaller then the 5.25in floppydrive and it's media and fixed some of the 5.25in floppies design problems. The disks are housed in a stiff housing, opposed to the "floppy" housing the 5.25in floppy was made in. Despite the more rugged design, 3.5 inch floppy drives tend to to be less reliable due to their compact nature.
3.5 inch floppies came in three different densities (easily distinguished by a second hole on the side) and while only the earliest 3.5in disks were single sided, almost all 3.5 inch floppies can be written to on both sides. The 3 densities are:
- Double density (a.k.a. DD, 720kb)
- High density (a.k.a. HD, 1.44mb)
- Extra high density (a.k.a. ED, 2.88mb)
Like earlier floppies, there were many different ways to format a disk, often depending on what type of computer the disk was formatted with. On PC's, DD disks were usually (DOS-)formatted to 720KB (though in practice it had about 714KB of usable space), HD disks formatted to 1.44MB (in practice it was around 1.38MB) and the uncommon 2.88MB disks (primarily used in IBM PS/2s) formatted to around 2.76MB. On older Macs the DD disks formatted to around 820KB, and on Amiga 880kb.
In the 1990ies the demand for higher capacities increased. Software utilities appeared that allowed to format disks to higher capacities like 1.72 Mb. By loading a small TSR-driver such formatted disks could be used like the normal 1.44 Mb formatted disks in DOS. Well known tools are fdformat (fdread), vgacopy (vgaread). Even Microsofts made use of this by introducing the DMF format (1.68 Mb) for distributing software on disks. Current archiving tools like Winimage also support disks with increased capacity. Most over-formatting utilities don't handle ED disks, as the format never gained much popularity.
The overall transfer speed when reading from a 1.44 Mb disk is about 30 kB/s. This could be tuned by formatting disks with an optimal track interleave that reduces access times after a track change on sequential reads significantly. Tools like vgacopy offered this feature.
