A 3.5-inch 16MB floppy disk drive

Along with the spread of OA equipment such as personal computers, work stations and word processors, the flexible magnetic disk drive (FDD) is increasing in importance as an external memory device which can be moved among different equipment. In addition, FDDs are in demand in various applications and areas such as OS software delivery, HDD back-up and software which contains video and voice data. There is, however, a need for improvement of memory capacity, boosting of the data transfer rate and miniaturization. In line with these targets, we would like to report on the development of a 3.5 inch 16 MB flexible magnetic disk drive. In particular, we will focus on an explanation of the drive itself, the processing of the recording and reproduction signal and the host interface.