While there are few in service today, the ones that exist appear to be wearing out. An external version was available to complement the internal drive. Using only one side of the disk, these drives are largely obsolete and have been for some time now – Apple sold the last 400K drive in 1986. The earliest Macs (128K and 512K) used 400K floppy drives. A bootable floppy is always good to have in times of trouble (refer to the troubleshooting section for more information on ideal startup floppies). While System 7 is often difficult to fit on a floppy and some of the newer Macs ship with a bootable CD-ROM instead of the old Disk Tools, System Tools, or System Startup disk that once was shipped as a bootable floppy, some older Macs with no hard drives rely on floppies to boot. Note that an SE or SE SuperDrive with no hard drive (which takes the place of the second floppy in an SE or LC) can support a total three floppy drives.Īll Macs have the capability to boot from a floppy. All other Macs support only one internal floppy drive.Įxternal floppy drives are supported only by the 128K, 512K, 512Ke, Plus, SE, SE SuperDrive, SE/30, IIcx, IIci, IIsi, Classic, and Classic II. These are the SE, SE SuperDrive, Mac II, IIx, IIfx, and LC. External floppy drives, once a popular add-on, have fallen out of favor due to the popularity of hard drives.Ī few Macs have the capability to use two internal floppy drives.
Apple has provided a floppy drive with every model of the Mac with the exception of a few PowerBook models. Floppies look to have several years left as a popular storage medium, as CD-ROM drives are read-only at this point and the technology to produce CD-ROMs is expensive and, at least for consumer models, still slow and awkward.ĭisks are also becoming less expensive every year, especially high density disks. Most Macs made within the past six years have a SuperDrive, and most new software seems to be shipping on these disks. Today, the 1.4 MB floppy has finally taken over after what seemed to be a long transition period.
Two years later, the double-sided drive brought 800 KB disks into light, followed by the 1.4M SuperDrive in 1988.* The 2.8 MB extended density disks were never brought to the Mac (nor were they popular on IBMs). The first disks were single-sided and held roughly 400 KB of data. When the Mac came out in 1984, the floppy disk was the only type of storage medium available. For more about this document’s history and Baret’s experiences with Macs through his school years, see About This Article at the end of the page.
Scott Baret wrote and drew the original work in 1995 at the age of eight and began revising it a year ago.
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