3½" Floppy Disk Drive

The disk drive is a device that allows you to read data from and write data to a floppy disk.  This aspect of the computer is very standard and should be a part of your system.  There are no specifications of the drive that will affect you as you search for your system, other than the 3½" size.  A single disk can hold 1.44 MB (mega bytes) of data.  A floppy disk is a magnetic disk that is removable.  Even though the storage capacity is much less than a hard drive, a floppy disk is very useful for moving small amounts of data (a few files) from one computer to another.

Analogy - Since the disk can only hold 1.44 MB of data, compared to a hard drive, it is relatively tiny.  Comparing a standard floppy disk to a typical hard drive of 12 GB (giga bytes), one single 12 GB hard drive would equal a stack of 1.44 MB floppy disks over 90 feet high!

History - Originally disk drives were the ONLY type of data storage that was available on a PC computer.  There were no hard drives, no CD-ROMS, and certainly no DVDs, and 1.44 MB would have been a ton of space.

The first IBM PC portable computer had two 5¼" disk drives, of which the disks were truly floppy.  The top drive was used for the operating system and the program that you were running and the bottom disk was the disk that would store the data.   The user would have to constantly switch between the disks to keep his or her computer session going.  Each of those 5¼" disks would only hold 360 KB (kilo bytes).  Pretty amazing how far we have come in data storage over the years.

Manufacturers - There are numerous manufacturers.  The only consideration is price.  No other considerations should factor into your thinking about a 3½" drive.

What You Are Looking For - You will need a disk drive to back things up one file at a time, install some older software, and in some cases new drivers for peripheral equipment such as modems etc. which may be available only on floppy disks.  This is a necessary part of your computer system.