PC-DOS 1.44M format

The PC-DOS 1.44M format (3 1/2", double sided, high density) was the high-density counterpart of the PC-DOS 720K format, storing twice as much data due to use of a different media surface capable of handling a higher density of data. It had 80 tracks per side, with 18 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. High-density disk drives could handle both the new 1.44 MB format and the old 720K format, 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. The drive could tell which type of disk was inserted because high-density disks had an additional punched hole on the upper-left corner (both high and low density disks used a write-protect hole in the upper-right corner which could be opened or closed depending on whether you wanted to protect the disk from writing). Users occasionally punched holes in low-density disks to attempt to use them in high-density mode, but this did not work very reliably; the media was not designed for this.

In the late '80s and early '90s, it was common for desktop PCs to have both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" disk drives in order to be compatible with all software and data, which might be distributed on either format; by the 1990s these were usually high-density drives supporting the 1.2M and 1.44M formats. Often the 5 1/4" drive was drive A, and the 3 1/2" one was drive B. Later PCs, however, were more likely to have only a 3 1/2" drive, set up to respond to both drive letters. Eventually, PCs stopped having floppy disk drives altogether as other data storage and transfer media took over.