How a pair of scissors doubled your storage in 1992
You may think storage is expensive and scarce today, but today’s kids have no idea what it means to salvage every possible kilobyte. That’s why a floppy disk hack from the early ’90s promising twice your data seemed too good to be true. In many cases this was the case.
When 720 KB was the bottleneck
720 KB should be enough for everyone
In the early 1990s, 1.44 MB floppy disks (called high density disks) were already a few years old, having arrived on the market in 1987. However, standard 720 KB “dual density” disks were still the most common, partly because they were cheaper, and partly because not everyone had yet moved to HD floppy disk drives.
Incidentally, IBM had a 2.88 MB floppy disk variant, and there was even a 13 MB triple density floppy disk (as covered by Adafruit), but at the time I thought 1.44 MB was as good as it got.
720 KB certainly seemed too tight in 1992. Consider that one of the floppy disk images above wouldn’t even fit on a 720 KB disk, and that gives you an idea of just how tight that is by modern standards, but at the time, applications and media files were growing. In particular, large applications such as operating systems, games and office applications were located on multiple disks. Doubling the size from 720 KB to 1.44 MB is the difference between a dozen disks and 24 of them!
The little square hole that controlled everything
The 90s were basically controlled by tabs
Look at the two floppy disks below. Blue is a double density disc and yellow is high density. Do you notice a difference?
The blue disk only has one square hole at the bottom and the yellow disk has two. One on each side. This is the density sensing hole. If the hole is there, the drive switches to HD mode and treats the disk like any 1.44 MB floppy disk.
This means that the formatting settings are different and the bits will be packed tighter. Now is a good time to explain what the real differences between these discs are. On an HD disc, the magnetic coating is made of a different material. Iron oxide generally doped with cobalt. This is what allows the disk to pack its bits tighter.
However, this isn’t strictly necessary, it’s just that the coating on HD discs makes them reliable for this purpose and ensures that any HD disc can read the data.
The Scissor Hack That “Created” 1.44 MB Drives
The real double disc
However, if you were lucky, your DD handled the extra density just fine, and as long as you didn’t store crucial data on it without a backup, reliability could be managed.
All you had to do was carefully cut or drill a square hole in the same location as on an HD disc. That’s it, from there just insert the disc into the drive and treat it like any HD disc. As you can see in the picture below, the hole is literally just a bit of plastic removed.
The actual data surface isn’t close to it, so it’s not something you could easily get wrong.
Why it sometimes worked – and why it shouldn’t have
Man was not meant to wield such power
If you were lucky and did everything right, you would double your data capacity on that floppy disk, but over time the risk of data loss increases. The DD disk coating may not preserve data and the data may become corrupted.
However, as anyone who lived through the floppy disk era will tell you, these things were super fragile at the best of times anyway. I still remember the day I finally said goodbye to floppy disks for my computer science homework, because I was tired of losing the homework for no apparent reason. I spent an entire month’s pocket money on a 64MB USB stick and never lost my homework again.
The Old Punch Trick That Actually Unlocked Hidden Storage
This has happened before and it will happen again
The scissors trick for 3.5-inch floppy disks isn’t the first time people have literally hacked more space off their disks. The older, larger, and much softer 5.25-inch discs also had a trick you could do with an awl or scissors.
In the 1980s, some floppy disks were sold with only one side, but they had a magnetic coating on both sides. The only thing preventing the other side from being used was a notch, or rather lack thereof. In this excellent video from 8-Bit Guy, you can see how adding a notch allows you to flip the disk and write on the other side.
There were even dedicated tools sold to make this easy and reliable, but again, if you were careful you could achieve the same result just using an old pair of scissors. Take this big floppy disk!
