PC-DOS 360K format

The PC-DOS 360K format (or MS-DOS) was a very common floppy disk format in the 1980s, used on IBM PCs and compatibles. It replaced earlier 160K, 180K, and 320K formats using either fewer sectors, single-sided disks, or both, with a new format getting the most out of a double-sided, double-density 5 1/4" floppy disk. It had 40 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.

After being a commonplace format for most of the 1980s, this format declined in favor of the high-density PC-DOS 1.2M format and the 3 1/2" PC-DOS 720K format and PC-DOS 1.44M format.