What is floppy disk

 What is floppy disk:

Floppy disk are small,removable, media storage devices. The record data onto a thin, circular magnetic film in a flat square plastic jacket. Floppy disks are somewhat antiquated, having been replaced by memory sticks and re-writeable CD storage devices.

A soft magnetic disk is called floppy disk ( often floppies or diskettes) are portable, because you can remove them form a disk drive.Disks drives for floppy disks are called floppy drives. Floppy disks are slower to access than hard disks, and have less stronge capacity, but they are much less expensive and most importantly, they are portable.

Data is written to magnetic disks is concentric circles for each data surface, there is one read/write head, which for double sided floppy disk means there are two heads. There heads are coupled mechannically to a shuttle which moves the head assembly to different radius from the centre of the disk. Each discrete mechanical position at which data is to be written is the cylinder part of the data address. Cylinder are numbered with O (zero ) being theoutermost position common Hoppies have 80 cylinders with cylinder number 79 being the innermost cylinder. Physically moving the heads to the correct cylinder position is termed as seeking. The required head is selected electronically, according to the head or track part of the data address.For double sided floppy disks, heads are also numbers as 0 and 1 .

Types of floppy disk.

Floppy disks are classified on the basic of their size.The floppy disk are available in three basic sizw and they are:

8Inch Floppy:

The first floppy design, invented by IBM in the late 1960s and used in the early 1970s as first a read only format and then as a read-write format. The typical desktop/laptop computer does not use the 8-inch floppy disk.

Types of Floppy Disk Floppy disks are classified on the basis of their size. The floppy disks are available in three basic size and they are: 8 Inch Floppy: The first floppy disk design, invented by IBM in the late 196Os and used in the early 1970s first a read only format and then as a read-write format. The typical desktop/laptoop computer does not use the 8-inch floppy disk.

 5-1/4Inch Floppy This is the common size floppy disks for PCs made before 1987. stype of floppy is generally capable of storing between 100K and 1.2 MB (megabytes) of data. The most common size are 360 Kand 1.2MB.

3-1/2 Inch Floppy:

 This floppy disk is the last successful and enchanced version which encased in a rigit envelope. Despite their small size microfloppies have a larger storage capacity than their cousins- from 400K to 1.4 MB of data. The most common size for PCs are 720 K (double-density) and 1.44 MB (high-density). Macintoshes support disks of 400K, 800K and 1.2 MB. Various technologies have been used since 1991 in the attempt to extend the life of floppy disks by increasing capacity to 2.88 MB (extended density or ED) are even 120 MB and 240 MB (LS-120 and LS-240 respectively). However, none of these technologies were caught on. The former proved to be too small an increase of capacity for ubiquitous adoption and the later and unreliable form of storage. A real sign that floppy disks are all but obsolete is that most laptops no longer come with a floppy drive and many desktop systems do not include a floppy drive unless requested.