Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 336 views

    Parts of A Floppy Disk Drive

    Uploaded by

    Muhammad Asif Idrees
    A floppy disk is a magnetic storage medium encased in a plastic shell that was widely used for storage on personal computers and workstations in the late 20th century. It stores data in concentric tracks on a magnetic coating, allowing direct access to any file without needing to scan past other files. A floppy disk drive reads and writes data using magnetic read/write heads that move across the disk's surface. Floppy disks were invented in 1967 and evolved from 8-inch to 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch sizes, with later versions storing up to 1.44 megabytes of data.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Parts of A Floppy Disk Drive

    Uploaded by

    Muhammad Asif Idrees
    336 views2 pages
    A floppy disk is a magnetic storage medium encased in a plastic shell that was widely used for storage on personal computers and workstations in the late 20th century. It stores data in concentric tracks on a magnetic coating, allowing direct access to any file without needing to scan past other files. A floppy disk drive reads and writes data using magnetic read/write heads that move across the disk's surface. Floppy disks were invented in 1967 and evolved from 8-inch to 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch sizes, with later versions storing up to 1.44 megabytes of data.

    Original Title

    Parts of a Floppy Disk Drive

    Copyright

    © Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    A floppy disk is a magnetic storage medium encased in a plastic shell that was widely used for storage on personal computers and workstations in the late 20th century. It stores data in concentric tracks on a magnetic coating, allowing direct access to any file without needing to scan past other files. A floppy disk drive reads and writes data using magnetic read/write heads that move across the disk's surface. Floppy disks were invented in 1967 and evolved from 8-inch to 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch sizes, with later versions storing up to 1.44 megabytes of data.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    336 views2 pages

    Parts of A Floppy Disk Drive

    Uploaded by

    Muhammad Asif Idrees
    A floppy disk is a magnetic storage medium encased in a plastic shell that was widely used for storage on personal computers and workstations in the late 20th century. It stores data in concentric tracks on a magnetic coating, allowing direct access to any file without needing to scan past other files. A floppy disk drive reads and writes data using magnetic read/write heads that move across the disk's surface. Floppy disks were invented in 1967 and evolved from 8-inch to 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch sizes, with later versions storing up to 1.44 megabytes of data.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    Muhammad Asif Idrees

    Floppy Disk 2010


    Drive
    Terminology
    Floppy disk - Also
    Parts of a Floppy Disk called diskette. The common
    size is 3.5 inches.

    Drive Floppy disk drive - The


    electromechanical device that
    reads and writes floppy disks.
    The Disk Track - Concentric ring
    A floppy disk is a lot like a cassette tape: of data on a side of a disk.
     Both use a thin plastic base material coated with iron oxide. This
    Sector - A subset of a
    oxide is a ferromagnetic material, meaning that if you expose it to a
    magnetic field it is permanently magnetized by the field. track, similar to wedge or a slice
     Both can record information instantly. of pie.
     Both can be erased and reused many times.
     Both are very inexpensive and easy to use.
    If you have ever used an audio cassette, you know that it has one big disadvantage -- it is a sequential device.
    The tape has a beginning and an end, and to move the tape to another song later in the sequence of songs on
    the tape you have to use the fast forward and rewind buttons to find the start of the song, since the tape heads
    are stationary. For a long audio cassette tape it can take a minute or two to rewind the whole tape, making it hard
    to find a song in the middle of the tape.
    A floppy disk, like a cassette tape, is made from a thin piece of plastic coated with a magnetic material on both
    sides. However, it is shaped like a disk rather than a long thin ribbon. The tracks are arranged in concentric
    rings so that the software can jump from "file 1" to "file 19" without having to fast forward through files 2-18. The
    diskette spins like a record and the heads move to the correct track, providing what is known as direct access
    storage.

    In the illustration above, you can see how the disk is divided
    into tracks (brown) and sectors (yellow).
    The Drive
    The major parts of a FDD include:
     Read/Write Heads: Located on both sides of a diskette, they move together on the same assembly.
    The heads are not directly opposite each other in an effort to prevent interaction between write operations on
    each of the two media surfaces. The same head is used for reading and writing, while a second, wider head is
    used for erasing a track just prior to it being written. This allows the data to be written on a wider "clean slate,"
    without interfering with the analog data on an adjacent track.
     Drive Motor: A very small spindle motor engages the metal hub at the center of the diskette, spinning it
    at either 300 or 360 rotations per minute (RPM).
     Stepper Motor: This motor makes a precise number of stepped revolutions to move the read/write head
    assembly to the proper track position. The read/write head assembly is fastened to the stepper motor shaft.

    Page 1
    Muhammad Asif Idrees 2010
     Mechanical Frame: A system of levers that opens the little protective window on the diskette to allow
    the read/write heads to touch the dual-sided diskette media. An external button allows the diskette to be ejected,
    at which point the spring-loaded protective window on the diskette closes.
     Circuit Board: Contains all of the electronics to handle the data read from or written to the diskette. It
    also controls the stepper-motor control circuits used to move the read/write heads to each track, as well as the
    movement of the read/write heads toward the diskette surface.
    The read/write heads do not touch the diskette media when the heads are traveling between tracks. Electronic
    optics check for the presence of an opening in the lower corner of a 3.5-inch diskette (or a notch in the side of a
    5.25-inch diskette) to see if the user wants to prevent data from being written on it.

    Click on the picture to see a brief video of a diskette being


    inserted. Look for the silver, sliding door opening up and the
    read/write heads being lowered to the diskette surface.

    Read/write heads for each side of the diskette

    History of the Floppy Disk Drive


    The floppy disk drive (FDD) was invented at IBM by Alan Shugart in 1967. The first floppy drives used an 8-inch
    disk (later called a "diskette" as it got smaller), which evolved into the 5.25-inch disk that was used on the first
    IBM Personal Computer in August 1981. The 5.25-inch disk held 360 kilobytes compared to the 1.44 megabyte
    capacity of today's 3.5-inch diskette.
    The 5.25-inch disks were dubbed "floppy" because the diskette packaging was a very flexible plastic envelope,
    unlike the rigid case used to hold today's 3.5-inch diskettes.
    By the mid-1980s, the improved designs of the read/write heads, along with improvements in the magnetic
    recording media, led to the less-flexible, 3.5-inch, 1.44-megabyte (MB) capacity FDD in use today. For a few
    years, computers had both FDD sizes (3.5-inch and 5.25-inch). But by the mid-1990s, the 5.25-inch version had
    fallen out of popularity, partly because the diskette's recording surface could easily become contaminated by
    fingerprints through the open access area.

    Page 2

    You might also like