Anatomy of a Floppy Disk Drive

Introduction

We know that floppy disks are being replaced by USB memories and memory cards, but after disassembling a hard disk drive and an optical disk drive, we couldn’t help ourselves from publishing a tutorial showing how a floppy disk drive looks like from inside.

Figure 1: 1.44 MB floppy disk drive.

On PC floppy disk drives had five generations: 360 KB (5 ¼”), 1.2 MB (5 ¼”), 720 KB (3 ½”), 1.44 MB (3 ½”) and 2.88 MB (3 ½”). In this tutorial we will disassemble the most used model, which is the one available even today: the 1.44 MB 3 ½” model.

Floppy disk drives became so cheap that it is not worthwhile fixing one when it becomes defective: just throw it away and buy a new one. So, even though it is possible to fix a floppy disk drive, it simple makes no sense.

In Figure 2, you can see the back view of a floppy disk drive: it has only two connectors, one for power and the other for its communication with the computer, which uses a 34-wire flat-cable.

Figure 2: 1.44 MB floppy disk drive, back view.