Floppy Disk

Floppy Disk

» Floppy disk (FD) is a flat, round, single disk made of Mylar plastic and enclosed in square plastic jacket.
» Floppy Disk Drive (FDD) is the disk drive for floppy disk.
» The floppy disk is inserted into the floppy disk drive to read or write data to it.
» Floppy disk has a write-protect slide tab that prevents a user from writing to it.
» A floppy disk may be single-sided or double-sided disk, i.e., data can be read and written on one and both sides of floppy disk, respectively.

» They are portable. They can be removed from the disk drive, carried or stored separately.
» They are small and inexpensive.
» Floppy disks are slower to access than hard disk. They have less storage capacity and are less expensive than hard disk.
» They come in two basic sizes—5-¼ inch and 3-½ inch.
» The 5-¼ inch disk came around 1987. It can store 360 KB to 1.2 MB of data.
» The 3-½ inch disk has capacity of 400 KB to 1.44 MB. It usually contains 40 tracks and 18 sectors per track and can store 512 bytes per sector.