Drive C

Early PCs did not come with internal storage devices due to the expense. Instead, they generally had some form of a floppy disk reader, such as those used to read 5 1/4″ floppy disks, initially labeled as “A” in MS-DOS and certain other operating systems.

Some systems came with two such floppy disk drives necessitating the need for a “B”. When the 3.5″ floppy disk was commonly added, using both “A” and “B” for floppy drives was firmly entrenched.

When hard disk drives became standard in most PCs during the 1980s, since the first two letters were already commonly used for these floppy drives, they logically labeled the third storage device “C”, even though it now tended to be the main storage for the computer.

Even though no longer used, the drive designation remains, with A and B not used. Now you can easily change, remove or add drive letters for both physical and logical drives.