(This document is part of the PC-Clone Unix Hardware Buyer's Guide. The Guide is maintained by Eric S. Raymond ; please email comments and corrections to him.)

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Floppy Drives

There's not much to be said about floppy drives. They're cheap, they're generic, and the rise of CD-ROM drives as a cheap distribution medium has made them much less important than formerly.

The media come in two sizes -- 3.5-inch `hard-shell' floppies and 5.25" flexible floppies. The 3.5" variety carries 1.44MB of information; the older, larger 5.25" carries 1.2MB. The 5.25" variety is obsolete, but is still included with some new systems as a sort of vermiform appendix, like the useless ``Turbo'' buttons on many cases.

You'll probably never use floppies for anything but first boot of a new operating system, and can almost certainly do without a 5.25" drive entirely.

Go ahead and settle for cheap Mitsumi and Teac floppy drives. There are no `premium' floppy drives anymore. Nobody bothers. If you're seriously short of expansion-bay space, you can get a combination drive with 5.25 and 3.5" slots on a single spindle.

Eric S. Raymond