Being able to directly access sectors of a floppy disk on Windows. You could to this and read floppies with different file systems. Went away somewhere around Windows 2000 and modern external USB floppy disk drives just implement mass storage device class and you can’t access sectors or differently formatted drives.
Hmm. Sure about that? There may be a mixup in terminology. The mass storage device class is what USB sticks for example also uses, and that supports sector level access. In fact that's what's used, as the OS contains the file system implementation, not the device itself.
This is in contrast to the "Media Transfer Protocol" that a lot of smartphones use, for example, where the filesystem implementation is abstracted away in the device, and you essentially have commands to transfer files.
But there were some ways to effectively redefine the sectors themselves, e.g. formatting floppy disks with higher (or lower) capacity, independently of the file system that would sit on top (you'd still access sectors, but now there would be more or less of them). I don't know if USB floppy drivers still support that. And I also don't know whether Windows started to prevent sector-level access.
Comments
Being able to directly access sectors of a floppy disk on Windows. You could to this and read floppies with different file systems. Went away somewhere around Windows 2000 and modern external USB floppy disk drives just implement mass storage device class and you can’t access sectors or differently formatted drives.
Hmm. Sure about that? There may be a mixup in terminology. The mass storage device class is what USB sticks for example also uses, and that supports sector level access. In fact that's what's used, as the OS contains the file system implementation, not the device itself.
This is in contrast to the "Media Transfer Protocol" that a lot of smartphones use, for example, where the filesystem implementation is abstracted away in the device, and you essentially have commands to transfer files.
But there were some ways to effectively redefine the sectors themselves, e.g. formatting floppy disks with higher (or lower) capacity, independently of the file system that would sit on top (you'd still access sectors, but now there would be more or less of them). I don't know if USB floppy drivers still support that. And I also don't know whether Windows started to prevent sector-level access.