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Floppy Disk Drive

The floppy is the earliest forms of storage device. The floppy disk uses the magnetic disk storage format. The size is usually small in terms of memory storage. The floppy disk was first introduced by IBM in the year of 1971.

The floppy was extensively used for the purpose of backing up data. As the new technology gained access to the market, the CD ROM has gained in comparison with the floppy disk. The advantage is obvious if you would like to have the back up. The cd rom provides much storage capacity in terms of memory than the usual floppy disk.

The access speed in floppy disks is also slow like about 270 rpm and is much slower than hard drives. Also the floppy disks are not much reliable in terms of backing up of data. The usually get corrupted and are much susceptible to physical damage. The advantage when we use a floppy disk is that the data can be erased and again be added. But that is not the case when we use a cd rom, because the data once written over it cannot be again erased unless in the case of rewritable cd’s.

The floppy is much cheaper as compared to the other storage devices and is widely used to boot up a system. The first floppy disk was of the size of 8” physically which was flexible and had the memory capacity of 100 to 500 kilobytes. This was introduced by IBM.

The other floppy that was used was of the size of 5.25” physically and this was also flexible. The size in terms of memory was from 100kb to 1.2 megabytes. The creator for these types of disks was Shugart. The physical size changes the drives that need to be used for the floppy disks. The present generations floppy disks are 3.5” in physical size and may range form 400KB to 2.8MB in terms of memory. The creator of these disks was Sony.

The floppy disks are paving way for new means of data storage like the USB devices and the flash memory cards and many other devices as such. The structure of the floppy drives also changed over the year and the present day floppy drives only support the 3.5” floppy disk. This floppy disk is hard cased.

Also the zip drives are available in terms of data storage. They are usually costly as compared to the floppy disks but at the same time has much storage capacity and high access speed. The memory size may be in terms of mega bytes of about 250MB. The physical size is also that of the floppy size with a hard plastic casing. The drive that is used for this media is called as the Zip drive.

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