Floppy disks with a rectangular size of 5.25 inches contain a circular magnetically coated disk medium
protected by a flexible outer plastic sleeve or "jacket". These smaller 5.25" disks were the second generation
of disks, following the IBM introduced 8-inch disks. As these 5 and a quarter inch disks were the "smaller"
disks, they were sometimes called "Mini diskettes", "Mini disk", or "Minifloppy").
Earlier floppy disk drives usually wrote 40 tracks on lower density iron oxide magnetic coating, resulting
in 48 tracks per inch (48 TPI) on Single or Double Density disks. This format was introduced by Shugart Associates
and became a standard. Later generations of drive mechanics which were able to provide higher accuracy and "double
stepping" were able to double that and write 96 tracks per inch, 80 tracks, on recording media which was in turn
equally of higher quality, higher magnetic resolution (High Density).
Earlier Micropolis floppy disk drives ("
MegaFloppy") extended Shugart's standard of 48 tpi
(tracks per inch) and increased track count to 77 tracks on a disk, and with 100 TPI track density doubled the
available storage on a disk.
A next step was to also raise recording density in the "
MetaFloppy" series of drives.
While the industry's step from single to double densitity didn't change track width, but doubled capacity by replacing
FM data encoding with MFM, the Micropolis "quad density" drive technology combined a doubled track count and replaced
MFM data encoding with GCR to make four times as much total storage available on a single 5.25-inch floppy disk.
Despite a number of manufacturers (Tandon ,
Commodore, both in earlier
systems) adopting the 100TPI standard, Micropolis later switched to 96TPI when "double stepping" drives based on a
doubling of Shugart's 48TPI won out. (It's intersting to note that the higher track density was written on Double
Density recording media. Write heads used lower 300-oersted magnetic coercivity instead of 600-oersted needed to
write to high-density magnetic surfaces.)
5.25-inch media was available as "single density" SD (1D) and the more common "double density" DD (2D). Both of these
designations were generally identical to those of 8-inch disks.
Quad density (QD or 4D) doubles capacity over DD by narrowing the width of tracks to 0.160 mm (0.0063 in) for a density
of 96 tpi. As explained here, Micropolis (and some other manufacturers, Tandon, Micro Peripherals (MPI), Teac) used a track
density of 100 tpi to reach "Quad Density" in their drives.
High density (HD) on the other hand, improves capacity by utilizing a 96 tpi track density in conjunction with improved
cobalt disk coating and stronger 600-oersted write heads, allowing 9646 bpi to be written. This slightly wider track
width was incompatible with Micropolis' inital Quad Density track stepping, but when the 96 tpi standard won out in customer
adoption, Micropolis started offering 96 tpi drive versions in 1980 (Micropolis 1015-V and 1015-VI, Micropolis 1016-V 1016-VI).
Compare
1015/1016-family notes.