Question Floppy disks biggest capacity?

[Gaogier]

Hello

i just came across an article regarding floppy disks and it triggered a question that I can’t remember when or where I thought of it, but it was about floppy disks, so as I can’t remember when I read the first article, not the last one that triggered my memory, anyway in the article I read that U.S. government still use floppy disks as they can’t be hacked.

I think the article was talking about NASA mostly, it was saying that nasa still use floppy disks as they can’t be hacked and it has info and important data regarding launch calculations, rover data etc… I have no idea when I read this, it could be 20 years ago, but my question is, if they do, do they have special/modified floppy disks as the capacity of them were 1.44mb they would have to be a much bigger capacity for them to store all the data.

it could be completely wrong, but I can say that I have read an article that says the U.S. government do use old versions on window, as well as ATM cash machine, so how big is the biggest capacity for a floppy disk, did they get bigger as tech increased in spec, or were they just stopped being invested in? I have also read that people have made the disks have a much larger capacity, but how would they do this?

 

[USAFRet]

There were commercially available 2.88 MB 3.5" floppies.

 

[kerberos_20]

so how big is the biggest capacity for a floppy disk, did they get bigger as tech increased in spec, or were they just stopped being invested in? I have also read that people have made the disks have a much larger capacity, but how would they do this?

floppy itself started at few kilobytes and ended at 750MB, but 1.44MB floppy was more common, while 2.8MB was mostly on IBM workstations and it was considered as another superfloppy format

thre were two superfloppy updates for floppy drives
superdisk and zip disk, both are 3.5" floppy disks, just with improved write/read head which utilises optics to fit more data, this was eventualy replaced with optical discs (CD)

superdisk had maximum of 240MB, it was backward compatible with 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks which could also be re-formated to 32MB with superdisk drive
2.8MB floppy wasnt compatible

zip disks ended at 750MB and it wasnt backward compatible with 3.5" floppy;

 

[TerryLaze]

I think the article was talking about NASA mostly, it was saying that nasa still use floppy disks as they can’t be hacked and it has info and important data regarding launch calculations, rover data etc… I have no idea when I read this, it could be 20 years ago, but my question is, if they do, do they have special/modified floppy disks as the capacity of them were 1.44mb they would have to be a much bigger capacity for them to store all the data.

That data they are talking about, 20 years ago, was just a bunch of numbers and text files, they didn't do high res pictures or video back then.
Also it was NASA, they had the budget for a second floppy.

Also anything can be hacked and the smaller the amount of data the easier it is to hack it.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Floppies are most likely used as digital keys. In this case they don’t have tons of data on them.