PC-DOS 720K format

The PC-DOS 720K format (3 1/2", double sided, double density) was a very common floppy disk format in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, used on IBM PCs and compatibles. It was the main 3 1/2" disk format for the PC platform until the high-density PC-DOS 1.44MB format was introduced. It had 80 tracks per side, with 9 sectors per track, and 512 bytes per sector. Data was stored with MFM encoding. The disk turned at 300 RPM.

These disks were generally used with FAT12 file systems under the MS-DOS or PC-DOS operating system. The disks held exactly twice as much data as the earlier 5 1/4" PC-DOS 360K format, even though the disks were smaller.

The PC-DOS 1.44M format later took over much floppy-disk usage, though the lower-density 720K disks remained in use as well, with the high-density drives supporting both formats (though there could be compatibility issues in reading 720K disks on low-density drives after they were written to with a high-density drive, even though the writing is done in an emulation of the old format, due to the different drive head on the newer drives).