Since floppies store essentially analog signals, how is their theoretical capacity calculated? There are no addressable memory cells like those in RAM chips, so how does one arrive at 2 MB? The math is actually remarkably straightforward and has little to do with the medium and everything to do with the floppy controller (FDC) and drive. Note: This discussion is limited to 3½” high-density floppies, by far the most common format, unless otherwise noted. And that one megabyte is not like another. After more or less accidentally coming across a BBS listing of various high-capacity floppy formatting programs, I began wondering: How much data can really be stored on a diskette in a PC floppy drive? And what’s the relationship between formatted and unformatted capacity? When I started doing the math, I realized that the problem is both simpler and more complex than I had thought.
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