What on earth are floppy disks doing in a museum!
Over the years, there have been several different
types of data storage, and as technology has progressed, so have the
capacities of storage media.
There have been many different types
of floppy disk, all with varying capacities; this
page covers three such types, mainly because they
are the ones that I have in my collection; they are
as follows:
![The Disks](floppy/disks.jpg)
The three different types of disks that I have in my
collection, 5.25" disks, 3.5" disks and Amstrad CF2 (3")
disks. |
Click on the 5.25" disk for more
information about that type of disk, and my
experiences with it.
Here is graph that shows the
varying capacities of the three disk types as
bars, this gives a visual representation for
easy comparison.
The Amstrad CF2 disks are quite
enigmatic, there is not a lot of information about
these disks around, they were quite rare, and were
only used on systems manufactured by Amstrad in the
1980s.
The front of the disk drive looks quite
similar to the front of a 3.5" Disk drive:
![Front of Amstrad 3" Disk Drive](floppy/amsfro.jpg)
And yet, the actual disk looks completely different.
![Amstrad 3" Disk](floppy/amdisk.jpg)
Here is a capacity comparison table:
Disk Type |
Physical Size of Disk |
Disk Capacity |
Number required to store the capacity of
one 700Mb CD-Rom |
Number required to store the capacity of
one 4.7Gb DVD-Rom |
![5.25" Disk](floppy/525disk.gif)
5.25" Disks |
13.5cm (5.25inch)square. |
720K |
996 |
6,263 |
1.2Mb |
584 |
3,670 |
![CF2 Disk](floppy/ams.gif)
3" CF2 Disks |
8cm by 10cm
3 inch by 3.9inch |
500K |
1,434 |
9,018 |
![3.5" Disk](floppy/35.gif)
3.5" Disks |
9cm by 9.5cm
3.5inch by 3.7inch |
720K |
996 |
6,263 |
1.44Mb |
487 |
3,058 |
2.88Mb |
244 |
1,529 |
![Iomega Zip Disk](floppy/zip.gif)
Iomega Zip Disks |
10cm (3.8inch) square. |
100Mb |
7 |
45 |
250Mb |
3 |
18 |
|