Click on the picture to see a brief video of a diskette being inserted. Floppy Disk Drive Terminology. Floppy disk - Also called diskette. The common size is 3. Floppy disk drive - The electromechanical device that reads and writes floppy disks. Track - Concentric ring of data on a side of a disk. Sector - A subset of a track, similar to wedge or a slice of pie. Read More. Cite This! Print Citation.
Try Our Crossword Puzzle! The other major parts of a drive include the stepper motor and circuit board. The circuit board is responsible for taking the information and transferring it between the computer and floppy drive. The circuit board is also responsible for controlling the motors in the drive.
While the floppy disk drive used to be a standard feature available on all computers, technology has advanced to the point where that is no longer the case. Rather, those who want one will likely need to buy it separate from the computer or choose it as an add-on option for a new computer. They can still be bought as internal drives or external drives. You will also find out some cool facts about FDDs. The first floppy drives used an 8-inch disk later called a " diskette " as it got smaller , which evolved into the 5.
The 5. For a few years, computers had both FDD sizes 3. But by the mids, the 5. The Disk A floppy disk is a lot like a cassette tape :. 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 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. Drive Motor : A very small spindle motor engages the metal hub at the center of the diskette, spinning it at either or rotations per minute RPM.
An external button allows the diskette to be ejected, at which point the spring-loaded protective window on the diskette closes. If the motor were to spin too fast, the frequency would be too high, and when information is being written, the writer would not be able to store all the information necessary on the given track after one revolution. The information retrieved and written onto a floppy disk is controlled by the process of magnetic encoding.
In the reading and storing of data, the head uses the binary numbers 0 and 1 which correspond to the north and south poles of a magnet.
The opposite process is done when the head is reading information.
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