A floppy disk is a type of data storage device that was widely used from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It consists of a thin, flexible magnetic disk enclosed in a square or rectangular plastic shell. Floppy disks were commonly used to store and transfer files between computers, allowing users to save documents, programs, and other data. Floppy disks came in various sizes, with the most popular being the 3.5-inch disk, which could hold 1.44 megabytes of data. Although they have largely been replaced by more advanced storage solutions like USB flash drives and cloud storage, floppy disks played a crucial role in the early days of personal computing.