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Floppy disks are typically measured in inches, common sizes being 8", 5.25", 3.5" and 3". Like any distance, these may also be measured in metric units. However
by tom_ 8y ago
Floppy disks are typically measured in inches, common sizes being 8", 5.25", 3.5" and 3". Like any distance, these may also be measured in metric units. However, for whatever reason, when it comes to disks, they pretty much never are.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoHuh, is this true even outside the US? As in, did people in the UK call them 3.5 inch floppy disks, just like us Americans?
- RL_Quine 8y agoYes. Only a few things proliferate in inches, but products that are defined in inches always do. Subway sandwiches are a mixture, in the netherlands they are 30cm (an extra 30mm), in other metric countries they remain as a footlong.
- stan_rogers 8y ago30cm leaves you 4.8mm short of a foot. This is how we lose spacecraft.
- BlackLotus89 8y agoIn germany it was called "3 1/2 Zoll Diskette/Floppy" so yeah we didn't use the word inch, but I can confirm that this was true at least for us.
- rzzzt 8y ago"Zoll" is a direct translation from "inch". Inches were used when measuring wood. The actual size was different from region to region, because there was no agreement on whether it is 1/10 or 1/12 of a feet, and 1 foot itself would correspond to different lengths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_German_units_of_measurement#Fu%C3%9F_(foot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_German_units_of_measu...
- blattimwind 8y agoA good rule of thumb is that if it says somewhere "x inch" in a common kind of measurement, then the device never has any length of x inches. Eaxmples: - 3.5 in floppy disks have no 3.5 dimension (the disk is 86 mm, the cartridge is 94x90 mm, the drive is 100 mm). - 3.5 in hard drives have neither 3.5 in platters nor are any of their external dimensions 3.5 in - Ditto for 2.5 in drives, likely also true for 5.5 and 8 in drives. - Any kind of inch-sensor size (e.g. 1/2, 2/3) is not the size of the sensor measured in any way. - ...
- tom_ 8y ago5.25" disks are 5.25"/133mm along each side, making 5.25" a perfectly good description, in my view, for an object at this sort of scale. The disc inside must be 130mm in diameter, the case is presumably 3mm larger, and the whole thing is named after the size of the case. 5.25" = 133.35mm. I expect you could actually make a perfectly usable 5.25" disk that was exactly 5.25" wide... Apparently 8" disks are 8"/203mm wide, no doubt for exactly the same reason, and with a rather similar result.