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Everything You
Ever Wanted To Know About Hard disk drives are fixed media recording devices that store data magnetically on hard platters encased within the drives. (About.com) Before the advent of the large gigabyte hard drives, sometimes it was necessary to install either two internal hard disc drives, or one internal hard disk drive and one external disk drive. The technology for both internal and external drives is the same.
This screen shows a 20 gigabyte hard disk drive partitioned into a C drive and a F drive. The operating program and shared files are maintained on partition C, and the text and graphic files are kept on partition F. Floppy disks are fixed magnetic media storage based an a flexible media format that is portable. (About.com) Floppy disks are similar in design as hard disk drives. They cannot hold the amount of data, but they are portable. These are used to transport data from one computer to another. You can take data from your home computer to your computer at work by using floppy disks. Floppy disk drives are normally set as drive A with the hard disk drives being set at C and F.
The first floppy disk was made by IBM in the 1970's. It was an 8-inch square. Then came the 5.25-inch square floppies. These first generations of floppy disks were delicate and had to be carefully protected. Today the floppies measure 3.5 inches and are encased in plastic which protects the data. The 3.5-inch floppies hold 1.44 megabytes (MB), or 1,457,664 characters. Compact discs (CD) are "read only memory" (ROM) storage based upon the CD format of optical storage and can store about 650 Mb of data. (About.com). In other words, one CD can store approximately 451 floppies of data. Compact disc drives are generally set as drive D and drive E. The compact disc technology extends into compact disc-recordables (CD-Rs) and compact disc-rewritables (CD-RWs). Music formatted data can only be saved onto CD-Rs. To use the CD technology to backup data from the hard disk drive, it is best to use the CD-RWs so that the discs can be reused in a rotating manner. A zip drive holds 100 MB (megabytes) of data. This is equivalent to 69 floppies of data. However, a CD will hold about 6-1/2 zip disks. A Zip drive works very much like a floppy since you can transport data from computer to computer. The disk drive is normally set as drive I. Iomega is the most well-known manufacturer of zip drives.
Created by Brad Eaton and
Chris Sidebottom |
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