By using various techniques, such as head / track sector skewing, sector interleaving, and others, some traditional floppy disks could be formatted with a capacity as high as 2 MB.

However, there were various shareware and freeware programs that could effectively increase the size of the standard 1.44 MB floppy disk. This amounts to a total of 80 tracks on each side of the disk's platter, for 160 tracks overall, and resulting in a disk storage space of 1,474,460 bytes, or 1.44 MB. In the case of the 1.44 MB floppy disk, which was the standard at that time, the low-level formatting operation created 18 sectors with a total of 512 bytes on each. In older computer systems, particularly those that used floppy disks and the earliest iterations of mechanical hard drives, all low-level formatting was completed by the disk drive's controller. In most scenarios, this process is completed long before it ever hits store shelves or the hands of consumers - but there are some cases where the user might need to format their device.

Not only is this true of hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), but it's true of memory cards, USB flash drives, floppy drives, and nearly any device that is used to store data. After a data storage device has been manufactured, it needs to be formatted before it can be used to store, retrieve, or process data.

Mac floppy disk format