A mechanical storage device that reads and writes data on a flexible magnetic disk enclosed in a plastic casing. Once the standard for loading software and transferring files, these drives are mostly obsolete but still appear in legacy industrial control systems and older aviation hardware. They connect via a dedicated ribbon cable to a motherboard controller.
Heard on the job
We had to source a replacement floppy disk drive just to pull the diagnostic logs off the old CNC machine.
Also heard as
- floppy drive
- FDD