Neon-komputadór

Floppy Disk Drive

The floppy drive is a low-capacity (1.44 megabytes) removable memory storage device. The floppy disk drive on all PCs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hold the Microsoft operating system standard of writing 1.44 megabytes of information to a 3.5-inch disk. Like hard disk drives and tape data backup drives, floppy disks use magnetic storage. A substrate material, called Myler, is coated with a thin layer of magnetic material (mostly iron oxide). As the floppy drive head passes over the disk, the material is polarized in one direction or another establishing a binary flux state. This flux state is a detectable field thus allowing data to be read as well as written.

Inside the drive, a floppy disk rotates at a speed of 300 rpm (revolutions per minute). As the disk spins, the read/write heads move in and out writing to a unit called sectors. As both the top and the bottom of a standard floppy disk is used, the two sectors are sometimes called a cylinder. Disk drives read and write data on tracks, a single ring of data, which is divided into sectors, splices of a track. A standard floppy disk has 512 bytes per sector, 18 sectors per track, 80 tracks per side and 2 sides - thus a total of 1.44 megabytes. Formatting a disk is simply a process that makes the disk readable and writable to the operating system.

Floppy disks are notoriously sensitive. The heads have to be in direct contact with the magnetic medium and particles of dust, dirt, smoke, hair or even fingerprints can cause problems reading and writing to the disk. They should be handled and stored very carefully in a dust free environment. They should also be stored in a relatively cool, dry place (yes, this is difficult in East Timor) and far away from magnetic fields - including colour monitors!

Also, floppy disk drives themselves are also prone to breakage. This is usually due to the computer itself being in a dusty environment and by use of dirty or damaged floppy disks. Head cleaning kits are available from computer suppliers - these should be used about once every six months.

Why Aren't Floppy Disks Floppy?

It seems strange that the 3.5-inch disks are described as "floppy disks" when it is "obvious" that they are not "floppy". But when they were first invented, they were obviously quite floppy! The early floppy disks of the 1970s were 8 inches in diameter and held about 1 megabyte of storage (a little less than the 3.5-inch ones do today) - at that time hard disk drives consisted of 14-inch metal platters and were manually inserted into hard disk drives that would weight 50 kilograms or more. Later the standard for floppy disk drives become a 360kilobyte 5.25 inch disk - and still "floppy".

The 3.5-inch disk which we know today became a standard in 1987 when IBM introduced it to the PS/2 system. But the name "floppy disk" remained, even though the disks were now inside a "hard" plastic covering. The disk itself inside that coating is still floppy.