A floppy disk is a reusable data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible (”floppy”) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. Also called a “diskette,” the floppy is a flexible circle of magnetic material similar to magnetic tape, except that both sides are used. The read/write head contacts the surface through an opening in the plastic shell or envelope. Floppies rotate at 300 RPM, which is from 10 to 30 times slower than a hard disk. They are also at rest until a data transfer is requested. Following are the three types developed, from newest to oldest, and their raw, uncompressed storage capacity.
The drive grabs the floppy’s center and spins it inside its housing.
It was called a floppy because the first varieties were housed in bendable jackets. Flopy disk have been largely superseded by flash and optical storage devices while email has become the preferred method of exchanging small to medium size digital files.
Floppy disks are currently offered in three sizes:
• 8-inch: The first floppy disk 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.
• 5¼-inch: The common size for PCs made before 1987 and the predecessor to the 8-inch floppy disk. This type of floppy is generally capable of storing between 100K and 1.2MB (megabytes) of data. The most common sizes are 360K and 1.2MB.
• 3½-inch: Floppy is something of a misnomer for these disks, as they are encased in a rigid envelope. Despite their small size, microfloppies have a larger storage capacity than their cousins — from 400K to 1.4MB of data. The most common sizes for PCs are 720K (double-density) and 1.44MB (high-density). Macintoshes support disks of 400K, 800K, and 1.2MB.
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