From LQWiki

Floppy disks are so called because early floppies were in fact floppy - each was a single thin disk of magnetic media protected by a thin paper-like sleeve. The most common size was 5.25 inches. Even when the later standard 3.5 inch disks were encased in hard plastic, the disk inside was still "floppy". Storage capacity generally ranges from 360KB to 1.44MB though other capacities are possible. They are read by floppy drives, which are hardware devices containing the read/write heads that access the data contained on them. Thus floppies can easily be carried from machine to machine.

It is possible to run an entire operating system from a floppy disk (such as Orange Linux) and floppies are often used to store a boot-loader in order to avoid touching the MBR (called a Boot Floppy).

See also

• Hard disk

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