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If you go by the earlier description of removable memory, two other technologies, PC Cards and tape backups, also fit as removable media. PC Cards are a laptop-centric technology and are covered in Chapter 21, “Portable Computing,” whereas tape backups are part of the big world of backups and are covered in Chapter 17, “Maintaining and Troubleshooting Windows.”

Historical/Conceptual

Floppy Drives

Good old floppies! These little disks, storing a whopping 1.44 MB of data per disk, have been part of PCs from the beginning. For decades, the PC industry has made one attempt after another to replace the floppy with some higher-capacity removable media, only to keep falling back to the floppy disk. Floppy drive technology was well entrenched: motherboard makers found floppies easy to add, all BIOS supported them, and they were almost always the first boot device, so techs loved floppies when they helped boot a system.

Only in the past few years have we finally seen systems without floppy drives due to an industry push called legacy-free computing: an initiative forwarded by Microsoft and Intel back in 2001 to rid computers of old technologies such as PS/2 ports, serial ports, parallel ports—and floppy drives (interesting how long it took to start being adopted by PC makers). Thus, the venerable floppy drive will probably soon disappear from PCs. Until then, the floppy drive, that artifact from the Dark Ages of the PC world, will continue to be a viable technology you must know.

Floppy Drive Basics

When you insert a floppy disk into a floppy drive, the protective slide on the disk opens, revealing the magnetic media inside the plastic casing. A motor-driven spindle snaps into the center of the drive to make it spin. A set of read/write heads then moves back and forth across the disk, reading or writing tracks on the disk as needed. The current floppy disks are 3½ inches wide and store 1.44 MB (Figure 13-2). You use a 3½-inch floppy drive to access the contents of the disk.

Figure 13-2 Floppy drive and floppy disk

Whenever your system accesses a floppy disk in its floppy drive, a read/write LED on the outside front of the drive flashes on. You should not try to remove the floppy disk from the drive when this light is lit! That light means that the read/writes heads are accessing the floppy drive, and pulling the disk out while the light is on can damage the floppy disk. When the light is off, you can push in the small release button on the front of the drive to eject the floppy disk.

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NOTE The term “floppy” comes from the fact that early floppy disks were actually floppy. You could easily bend one. Newer floppy disks came in much more robust, rigid plastic casings, but the term has stuck—we still call them floppies.

The first PC floppy drives used a 5¼-inch floppy drive format (Figure 13-3). The 5¼-inch measurement actually described the drive, but most users also called the disks for those drives 5¼-inch disks. In the 1970s and early 1980s, before PCs became predominant, you would occasionally see an 8-inch format floppy drive in computers. Fortunately, these never saw any noticeable use in PCs. If you happen to run into an 8-inch drive or disk, keep it! Collectors of old computers pay big money for these old drives.

Figure 13-3 A 5¼-inch floppy drive and disk

Around 1986, the 3½-inch drives appeared and, within a few years, came to dominate the floppy world completely. Today, both 3½-inch and 5¼-inch floppy drives have mostly been replaced by CD and DVD burners and USB flash drives. If you are really interested, however, you can still purchase these drives on the Internet or special-order a custom-built system complete with floppy drives pre-installed.

Essentials

Installing Floppy Drives

All Windows systems reserve the drive letters A: and B: for floppy drives. You cannot name them anything other than A: or B:, but you can configure a floppy to get either drive letter. However, convention