Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
renamed
small computer system interface (SCSI)
when approved as an American National Standards
Institute (ANSI) standard.
Sony introduced the first 3 1/2-inch microfloppy drives and disks in 1981. The first significant
company to adopt the 3 1/2-inch floppy for general use was Hewlett-Packard in 1984 with its
partially PC-compatible HP-150 system. The adoption of the 3 1/2-inch drive in the PC was
solidified when IBM started using the drive in 1986 in some systems and finally switched its entire
PC product line to 3 1/2-inch drives in 1987.
In 2002, many companies started selling systems without floppy drives. This started with laptop
computers, where internal floppy drives were first eliminated and replaced with external (normally
USB) drives. By 2003, virtually all systems sold, be it desktop or laptop, no longer included a floppy
drive, although sometimes you can purchase an external USB model as an option. An optional USB
floppy drive can be used as a bootable drive if the BIOS permits it, as is the case with most recent
systems.
Note
To learn more about floppy drives, see the section “Floppy Disk Drives” in Chapter 10, “Flash
and Removable Storage” of the previous edition of
Upgrading and Repairing PCs
, 20th
Edition, included on the DVD packaged with this topic.
Tape Drives
Tape drives and media were once a somewhat popular form of magnetic storage for backup use.
Although the drives were expensive, the tape media was cheap, allowing multiple backup sets to be
inexpensively created. As hard drive capacities increased, however, the capacity of tape media could
not keep pace, and using multiple tapes to back up a single drive meant time-consuming and error-
prone media swaps. The performance of tape drives also suffered in relation to hard disks, greatly
increasing the time it took for a backup to complete. Hard drives also become much less expensive,
such that it was cheaper and easier to simply purchase more hard drives for backups. Over time, all
these factors have caused tape backup drives and media to no longer be suitable for standard desktop
or laptop PC backups. Currently, tape drives and media are only used for high-end server backups.
The most common types of tape backups in use today include LTO Ultrium 5 (with a
native/compressed capacity of 1.5/3.0TB), LTO Ultrium 4 (800GB/1.6TB), LTO Ultrium 3
(400/800GB), and SDLT (160/320GB).
