Floppy disk drive how does it work

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. Circuit Board : Contains all of the electronics to handle the data read from or written to the diskette.

If the disk spins too slow, the frequency will be too low, and would be unreadable by the magnetic floppy disk. 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. However, because most programs were larger than 1.

For example, the diskette version of Windows 95 came on 13 DMF diskettes and was installed one disk at a time. Floppy disks were also a common place for users to store and back up their files. For example, a word processing file could be copied to a floppy disk and opened on another computer or stored as a backup. There are still a few diehards who are using floppy diskettes, and some government agencies still even use the 8" version.

However, since the early s, computers no longer shipped with floppy disk drives as users moved to CD-R and Zip drives , and later USB jump drives as capacities rose and prices fell. All the latest versions of Microsoft Windows also no longer include support for internal floppy drives because new computers do not come with them. If you have a new computer and want to read old floppy diskettes, you may purchase a USB floppy drive that works with all the latest computers.

A floppy drive is a magnetic medium that stores and reads data on the floppy disk using a read head. Prev NEXT. Computer Hardware. In the illustration above, you can see how the disk is divided into tracks brown and sectors yellow. Both use a thin plastic base material coated with iron oxide.

This oxide is a ferromagnetic material, meaning that if you expose it to a magnetic field it is permanently magnetized by the field. Both can record information instantly. Both can be erased and reused many times.

Both are very inexpensive and easy to use. 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.