What Is A Floppy Disk?
The floppy disk is and outdated storage medium. Made of thin disks, the storage medium is magnetic based (like hard disks are) enclosed in a square or rectangular plastic cover.
Floppy disk technology has evolved from its huge 10 inch size, to 3.5 inches, making it more compact, while the storage space increased. Eventually, zip disks were made with its basis in floppy technology, before it itself was superseded by CD’s and DVD’s.
How Does The Floppy Disk Work?
Floppy disk would only works with the aptly named floppy disk drive.
A small magnetic disc is sandwiched a plastic covering. This is where data is stored and read from. A read/write head on the drive will manipulate data on the floppy disc.
How Does A Floppy Disk Read/Write?
In floppy disk, reading and writing data is almost to be the same. The following will explain how a floppy disk read/writes:
- The computer will pass down a command to the computer hardware to record a data file on the floppy disk.
- The motor in the diskette drive will now begin to spin the floppy disk.
- The disk could contain many concentric tracks on each side where it is divided into smaller segments called sectors.
- A stepper motor will now make its rotation in small increase that will correspond to the spacing between the tracks. Access time means the time it takes to obtain the correct track. This partial revolution of the stepper motor will adjust itself in order to read/write. The fdd devices will know how many steps the motor has made in order to read/write heads to the correct track.
- Then the read/write process will halt. The read head will verify the prewritten address on the formatted floppy disk to ensure that it is using the correct side and it is on a right track.
- Before the data is being stored to the floppy disk, an erase coil is geared up to ‘remove’ a wide, and the ‘clean array’ sector subsequent to the recording the sector data with the write head. The cleared sector is broader than the written sector which means that there won’t be any signals from sectors in closest tracks that will interfere with the sector being written.
- The write head place data on the floppy disk by attracting minute, iron, bar-magnet particles implanted in the diskette surface. The magnetized particles will cause their pattern to be detected and read on a following read operation.
- After that, the diskette will stop spinning and waits for the next command.
