What happened to the A and B Drives? (Windows)

If you’ve ever used a windows computer and saved or organised files before you likely have noticed the first drive listed is usually the c drive. If you add a second drive or external storage it nearly always defaults to D. But what happened to the A and B drives? In this video we’re going to answer that questions.

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In the early days of computing, internal hard drives were very expensive as we can see from this hard drive advert from the early 80’s for just a 10mb drive. Given the cost of these hard drives it wasn’t uncommon for computers to feature no hard drive at all and to run the operating system and programs directly from a floppy disc.

In this example we can see an old computer with 2 floppy disc drives. The first being the A drive which the operating system was inserted into and then the 2nd drive or the B drive for programs and applications. If the user had no internal hard drive and wanted to run a different application they’d have to remove the program floppy disc from the b drive and reinsert the floppy disc containing their desired program. In the case of the user having an internal hard drive this would be the c drive by default as we have today.

So that’s what the A and B drive were originally used for but in todays world we don’t use floppy discs so why do we not just use the A and B drive first by default?

The first reason is that over decades, users have become accustomed to the primary hard drive being labelled C:. Changing this convention would create confusion and unnecessary head aches. If its not broken don’t fix it is the thinking.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly, many operating systems and applications were designed with the assumption that the primary hard drive is C:. Changing this convention would require modifications to some existing software. Understandably developers don’t want this unnecessary additional work as it adds virtually nothing to the users experience.
Do you think we should switch to using A as the default operating system drive or should we stick with how things are? Let me know down in the comments and please do subscribe if you’ve enjoyed this video and thanks for watching!

#windows #cdrive #storage

[techindex]

Do you think we should switch to using the C drive as the default operating system drive?

[arubaguy]

I started using and programming computers when the drives used 5-1/4" actual "floppy" disks. I think their capacity was somewhere around 760k! I remember renting an external 20MB hard drive that took up 1/2 sq.ft. of desk and weighed 10 pounds for my software business because buying one was more than budget would allow. Monitors were huge boxes with 14" monochrome displays. The World-Wide Web was only accessible through an acoustic modem and a dial phone, and download speeds were a blazing 720KBPS. Now my laptops have 1 terabyte SSDs +500GB hard drives in them. That's 75, 000 times the capacity of the external HD, They the size of a stack of ten playing cards and weigh 1 ounce. The machines are connected to the internet at >100MBPS 24/7.
That's how ancient I am.

[ScottIrvine]

I have used computers with A & B floppy drives. I have been used to C being the default drive since I first installed an internal hard drive.

[iamamines]

I thought there were partitions a & b but only used as parity or something.. Well now I know better!

[amazing_bobson]

Just a question, if you partition a hard drive why couldn't you assign it as A or B instead of some letter after D?

[kevinchastain]

Floppy drives used different connectors than the hard drives these connectors are sometimes not even on newer hardware. Early machines could support up to 4 floppies so many times your hard drive was labeled D E or F . When hard drives became standard in computers the floppies where still used to enter any programming to the hard drive so A and B where reserved for floppies and C was the start of the hard drives. with the introduction of CD roms the floppies lost there usefulness and disappeared from modern machines. If your modern machine dose still have floppy support you will only be able to connect one through a DRVSB connector that routes it through the serial port bus.

[fcsuper]

Using C: for boot HD isn't a big deal. Also, many computers from the pre-HD era had just one floppy. You'd put in your boot disk and take it out when boot was done. MS DOS was small enough to completely reside in the memory once loaded. Even two floppy drives was a luxury.

[davidflack]

And why is the save icon still a floppy disc?

[markclark]

Its not broke let it alone. I labled a HDD partition as A and used a floppy disk Icon for it, so it looks like i have a floppy drive as A