Diskette Drive (Disk Density, High Disk Density, Formatting Boot Record FAT Folder Directory, Hard Disk Drive, CD Rom Drive, DVD Rom Drive, Tape Drive)

A diskette drive is a term used to describe a floppy disk drive. Commonly the A: or B: drive on IBM compatible computers; this drive allows users to read and write information to floppy disk drives.

A diskette is a random access, removable data storage medium that can be used with personal computers. The term usually refers to the magnetic medium housed in a rigid plastic cartridge measuring 3.5 inches square and about 2millimeters thick. Also called a “3.5-inch diskette,” it can store up to 1.44 megabytes (MB) of data. Although many personal computers today come with a 3.5-inch diskette drive pre-installed, some notebook computers and centrally-administered desktop computers omit them.

Some older computers provide drives for magnetic diskettes that are 5.25 inches square, about 1 millimeter thick, and capable of holding 1.2 megabytes of data. These were sometimes called “floppy disks” or “floppies” because their housings are flexible. In recent years, 5.25-inch diskettes have been largely replaced by 3.5-inch diskettes, which are physically more rugged. Many people also call the newer hard-cased diskette a “floppy.”

Magnetic diskettes are convenient for storing individual files and small programs. However, the magneto-optical (MO) disk is more popular for mass storage, backup, and archiving. An MO diskette is only a little larger, physically, than a conventional 3.5-inch magnetic diskette. But because of the sophisticated read/write technology, the MO diskette can store many times more data.

Types of Diskettes

There are dozens of types of diskettes commercially available. If one were to cite a single properly, however, that most distinguishes one of these products from another, that property would likely be size.

Diskettes are widely available in three sizes (diameters)- 3.5 inches, 5.25 inches, and 8 inches. Historically, the 8-inch diskettes came along first, then respectively, their 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch counterparts.

The 8 inch and 5.25 inch diskettes are encased in flexible, plastic-coated cardboard jack­ets, whereas the 3.5 inch diskettes are contained in rugged plastic cases that can fit into a shirt pocket.

Eight-inch diskettes are more commonly used with small minicomputers and 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch sizes with micro­computer systems. Strange as it may seem, 3.5 inch diskettes can store more data than 5.25 inch ones.

Despite their small size, diskettes can store a respectable amount of data. Common capacities are 360 kilobytes for 5.25 inch diskettes and 720 kilo­bytes, 800 kilobytes, or 1.44 megabytes for 3.5 inch diskettes.

A 360 kilo­byte diskette can store over 100 typewritten pages of information; thus, 3.5 inch diskettes can store about 400 pages. Mega floppies- diskettes that can carry 2, 4, or 10 megabytes of data- are also available, although not com­monly found in practice.

It is highly possible that the next generation of microcomputers will use a mega floppy format.

To protect data, diskettes also contain a write-protect notch or square. This prevents the user from accidentally writing on the disk. Covering the notch on 5.25 inch diskettes makes it impossible to write on the surface.

The convention on 3.5 inch and 8 inch diskettes is the opposite: Exposing the notch or square makes writing impossible.

Disk Density

Disk density is a capacity designation on magnetic storage, usually floppy disks. Each designation describes a set of characteristics that can affect the areal density of a disk or the efficiency of the encoded data. Such characteristics include modulation method, track width, coercivity, and magnetic field direction.

High Density Disk

A high-quality floppy disk capable of holding more data than a double-density disk. High-density 5¼-inch disks for PCs can hold 1.2-MB (megabytes) of data. High-density 3½-inch disks can store 1.44MB.

Formatting Boot Record FAT Folder Directory

A FAT file system is a specific type of computer file system architecture and a family of industry-standard file systems utilizing it.

The FAT file system is a legacy file system which is simple and robust. It offers good performance even in very light-weight implementations, but cannot deliver the same performance, reliability and scalability as some modern file systems. It is, however, supported for compatibility reasons by nearly all currently developed operating systems for personal computers and many home computers, mobile devices and embedded systems, and thus is a well suited format for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from 1981 through the present.

Originally designed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, FAT was soon adapted and used almost universally on hard disks throughout the DOS and Windows 9x eras for two decades. Today, FAT file systems are still commonly found on floppy disks, USB sticks, flash and other solid-state memory cards and modules, and many portable and embedded devices. DCF implements FAT as the standard file system for digital cameras since 1998. FAT is also utilized for the EFI system partition (partition type 0xEF) in the boot stage of EFI-compliant computers.

For floppy disks, FAT has been standardized as ECMA-107 and ISO/IEC 9293:1994 (superseding ISO 9293:1987). These standards cover FAT12 and FAT16 with only short 8.3 filename support; long filenames with VFAT are partially patented. According to Google Patents the “Common name space for long and short filenames”(US5758352A) status was expired in 2019, which may mean that patents expired completely.

Hard Disk Drive

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that uses magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital data using one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data even when powered off.

Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs were the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers, though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like cell phones and tablets, rely on flash products. More than 224 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most units are manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. HDDs dominate the volume of storage produced (exabytes per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly, sales revenues and unit shipments are declining because solid-state drives (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, better reliability, and much lower latency and access times.

The revenues for SSDs, most of which use NAND, slightly exceed those for HDDs. Flash storage products had more than twice the revenue of hard disk drives as of 2017. Though SSDs have four to nine times higher cost per bit, they are replacing HDDs in applications where speed, power consumption, small size, high capacity and durability are important. Cost per bit for SSDs is falling, and the price premium over HDDs has narrowed.

The primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and performance. Capacity is specified in unit prefixes corresponding to powers of 1000: a 1-terabyte (TB) drive has a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes (GB; where 1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes). Typically, some of an HDD’s capacity is unavailable to the user because it is used by the file system and the computer operating system, and possibly inbuilt redundancy for error correction and recovery. Also there is confusion regarding storage capacity, since capacities are stated in decimal Gigabytes (powers of 10) by HDD manufacturers, whereas some operating systems report capacities in binary Gibibytes, which results in a smaller number than advertised. Performance is specified by the time required to move the heads to a track or cylinder (average access time) adding the time it takes for the desired sector to move under the head (average latency, which is a function of the physical rotational speed in revolutions per minute), and finally the speed at which the data is transmitted (data rate).

The two most common form factors for modern HDDs are 3.5-inch, for desktop computers, and 2.5-inch, primarily for laptops. HDDs are connected to systems by standard interface cables such as PATA (Parallel ATA), SATA (Serial ATA), USB or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) cables.

CD Rom Drive

A CD-ROM (compact disc read-only memory) is a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write to or erase—CD-ROMs, i.e. it is a type of read-only memory.

During the 1990s, CD-ROMs were popularly used to distribute software and data for computers and fourth generation video game consoles. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data (such as software or digital video) is only usable on a computer (such as ISO 9660 format PC CD-ROMs).

The CD-ROM format was developed by Japanese company Denon in 1982. It was an extension of Compact Disc Digital Audio, and adapted the format to hold any form of digital data, with a storage capacity of 553 MB. CD-ROM was then introduced by Denon and Sony at a Japanese computer show in 1984. The Yellow Book is the technical standard that defines the format of CD-ROMs. One of a set of color-bound books that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats, the Yellow Book, standardized by Sony and Philips in 1983, specifies a format for discs with a maximum capacity of 650 MB.

DVD Rom Drive

Digital versatile disc-read only memory (DVD-ROM) is a read-only digital versatile disc (DVD) commonly used for storing large software applications. It is similar to a compact disk-read only memory (CD-ROM) but has a larger capacity. A DVD-ROM stores around 4.38 GB of data. A CD-ROM usually stores 650 MB of data.

A DVD-ROM permanently stores data files which cannot be changed, written over or erased. A personal computer (PC) with a DVD-ROM or a DVD-RAM drive is designed to read a DVD-ROM disc. Generally a DVD-ROM disc is not equipped to be used with a DVD drive connected to a home theater system or television. But many DVD-ROM drives can generally read a DVD movie disc.

A DVD-ROM is one of the various types of DVDs. A blank DVD is generally a DVD-R or DVD+R, which has a read-write format. The +R or -R references the format standards and is a rewritable or recordable DVD.

Compared to a CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM has the same 5 inch diameter and 1.2 millimeter (mm) thickness. But because a DVD-ROM uses a shorter wavelength laser with tighter compacted pits, the disc capacity is increased. In fact, the smallest DVD-ROM can store approximately 7 times more data than a CD-ROM.

Tape Drive

A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability.

A tape drive provides sequential access storage, unlike a hard disk drive, which provides direct access storage. A disk drive can move to any position on the disk in a few milliseconds, but a tape drive must physically wind tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data. As a result, tape drives have very large average access times. However, tape drives can stream data very quickly off a tape when the required position has been reached. For example, as of 2010 Linear Tape-Open (LTO) supported continuous data transfer rates of up to 140 MB/s, a rate comparable to hard disk drives.