Floppy Disk
Soft magnetic disk, It is called floppy because it flops if you wave it (at least, the 5-inch variety does).
Unlike most hard disks, floppy disks (often called floppies or diskettes) are portable, because you can remove them from a disk drive. Disk drives for floppy disks are called floppy drives. Floppy disks are slower to access than hard disks and have less storage capacity, but they are much less expensive. And most importantly, they are portable. Floppies come in three basic 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.
•5-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.
•3-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).
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Macintoshes support disks of 400K, 800K, and 1.2MB.
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A reusable magnetic storage medium and drive introduced by IBM in 1971. It was officially called a “diskette,” but nicknamed “floppy,” because the first varieties were housed in bendable jackets. Until the early 1990s, the floppy was the primary method for distributing applications, for backup and for transferring data between machines, and most computers had a floppy drive. By the mid-1990s, the floppy gave way to the CD-ROM for software distribution, while local networks and the Internet became popular for backup and data exchange.
Like Magnetic Tape. The floppy’s recording surface is a circular platter of magnetically coated plastic similar to magnetic tape, except that both sides are recordable. The drive grabs and spins the platter inside its jacket, while the read/write head contacts the surface through an opening in the jacket. At 300 RPM, floppies rotate considerably slower than a hard disk, and they also come to a complete stop when there is no read/write activity.
Format before writing, every new floppy must be “formatted,” which writes the sectors on the disk that hold the data (see format program).
However, by looking at the external jacket, one cannot always discern the recording format. See magnetic disk and high-capacity floppy.
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