Floppy Disk

A Floppy diskette is a very thin plastic film in a circular plate shape. The name floppy is used the thickness of mylar disk is very less of about a few thousands of an inch. Therefore flexible, or floppy coated with magnetic material is enclosed in a protective jacket. There is a oval shape opening on both sides of the storage film on jacket called Head slot. Where the Read/write head can be positioned to read/write the diskette surface. There is a clamping hole in the center of the diskette for mounting the disk drive hub.

When the floppy diskette is placed in the floppy drive, the driving mechanism rotates the floppy disk inside the jacket. The Read/write head is moved in add out radially at the oval shaped opening where floppy disk’s magnetic reading surface is opened for reading or writing.

Floppy disk’s storage area is organized into tracks and sectors just like hard disk. The storage capacity of a floppy disk is specified in kilobytes for example a floppy disk has 2 surfaces, 40 tracks, each track of 9 sectors and each sector is capable of storing 512 bytes give rise to a floppy disk’s storage capacity as 360KB. A high density floppy disk has a storage capacity of 1.2MB. this is diagram of floppy disk of 5 ¼ inch.

A floppy disk has a small hole called index hole used to mark the beginning of first sector in a track. There is a write protect notch, if this notch is covered with an insulated plastic sticker, then computer cannot write any information on to the disk surface but stored information can be read. Therefore if the write protect notch is open both read and write operation can be disk controller is used to control the operation of floppy disk. The floppy disks physical size is normally 5 ¼ inch since diameter of circular storage film is 5 ¼ inch and enclosed in 5 ¼ inch plastic protective jacket.

This diskette is known as Mini Floppy diskette available as high density floppy disk with 1-2 MB of storage or as double density floppy disk with 360KB of storage. the micro floppies for computers are with 3 ½ inch disks. The 3 ½ inch microfloppy disk offers a storage of 1.44 MB.

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