Sort of yes, sort of no. Later drives were just black boxes with their own on-board logic that read metadata off the disk, sure. Early drives, though (of the 5.25&quot; variety) relied on the first track of the disk to contain what was basically the disk controller firmware†.<p>As such, you could actually teach an old drive new tricks by coming up with a firmware that used a better encoding scheme, and then encoding the rest of your disk with that scheme.<p>† (though it ran on the CPU, rather than some microcontroller in the drive. &quot;DOS&quot; stands for <i>Disk</i> Operating System for a reason: a large part of it is a set of routines programs can call to make the CPU micromanage the read-head and stepping motor of the dumb disk-drive controller, with concepts like &quot;files&quot; being a mostly-optional thin wrapper above that, rather than some impenetrable abstraction layer.)