Death of the floppy.

[BC_Programmer]

the 5- 1/4" came in 160K, 180K, 360K and 1.2MB (I think I missed one (720K?)); 3-1/2 came in 720K, 1.44MB, and later on, 2.88MB. the 2.88MB drives are rare because when they were released the floppy drive was already falling out of favour as the main way of saving files and backups, additionally, the fact that the drive used perpendicular recording made the drives themselves expensive enough to not be a commodity, which means they were included only on a few machines.

[rthompson80819]

When I first read this article, I was surprised how many formats there were for  floppy drives.  I've used a number of different formats, but there were a lot I'd never heard of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

[sunnysky]

Not sure where you got 3mb of usable files on a floppy.. mine were generally 1.44mb I have a stack of them gaining dust.
But that's me. Maybe you mean 2.88mb.

Actually, I don't actually remember exactly how many mb's were on my floppies, lol. I guess it was 1.44 then, since someone said 2.88 is rare. I can check, but I gotta dig through a bunch of old stuff.

[Computer_Commando]

The Zip drive killed this one:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical
It wasn't any better, just greater capacity.