The Storage Capacity of a 13-inch Floppy Disk, or, Things You Shouldn’t Run Regression Analysis On
Yesterday, my friend Chris declared that his giant soft fluffy Squishable floppy disk has been shipped. Given that the bigger a floppy disk is the less data it holds I estimated that his giant squishy floppy would hold maybe “like, a third of a megabyte?” So of course he decided that we needed to mathematically determine once and for all how much a 13-inch floppy disk would hold.
Problem: he had actual Work to do. But it turns out that testing out regression analysis on graphing calculators is actually literally an item on my todo list. So I went to the Wikipedia page for floppy disks (I’m not old enough to have used 8 inch floppies), found some numbers, and plopped them into a calculator lying around, pressed the exponential regression — because we’re going to do this as right as possible — button, and got this:
Here are some Terrible Incorrect Conclusions we can draw from this analysis:
- 13 inch floppy disks hold approximately 628 kilobytes of data.
- The smaller you make a floppy disk, the more data it holds. However even with the most advanced nanotechnology there is a limiting storage capacity of almost 1930 kilobytes.
- You lose 9.3% of data capacity for each extra inch of floppy disk side length.
- If an official Ultimate disc (10.75in in diameter) was a floppy disc it would hold 763 kilobytes of data. While this is significantly less than a standard 3.5 inch floppy the aerodynamic properties of a disc would increase your overall data transfer rate by quite a lot.
- At 167 inches, a floppy disk would only be able to hold a single byte of data.
- The entire area under the curve is 22347 inch-kilobytes which I guess is the volume of whatever solid you get when you literally stack up a rectangular prism representing data over the surface of an infinite floppy disk like a bad movie data visualization?
