Floppy disk drive originally invented by Alan Shugart in 1967 for IBM (in 8" diameter format originally ) has been around along time now and is slowly becoming obsolete .

Sony were the first to introduce the 3.5" floppy drive in 1983

The floppy disk is driven by a spindle motor  at about 300 rpm with two heads ,one on top and one underneath resting on the disk. A second motor called the stepper motor drives the heads across the disk to the precise location of the data .

Dirt , dust , smoke , hair and fingerprints can cause read and writing errors especially if the protective shutter is missing or damaged on your disks. It is recommended that the heads be cleaned after every 40 hours of use.

The floppy drive is controlled by a super I/O chip on your motherboard and gives a speed through put of about 1 M Bits per sec .

The floppy controller uses IRQ 6 , DMA 2 and  I/O ports 3F0-3F5,3F7 of your system resources.

Newer Systems now support El Torito (bootable CDRoms) whereas previously a floppy drive were  essential to be able to boot your pc if your operating system or hard disk failed .usually a rescue or boot floppies were utilised to restore your system.

The good news is that a new standard called "Mt .Rainer" will allow a CD-RW drive to completely replace the old floppy drive.

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. Revised: January 31, 2010