Magnetic Discs

The floppy disk which has the longest access time of all the hard disk drives because it spins slowly can hold up to about 2 megabytes of data and it is used to transfer data between computers where no network link exists, to supply software and in some cases to back up personal computer systems. Floppy discs normally have a write-protect mechanism. By positioning a small tab the disc is tagged as read only, thus protecting against accidental erasure.

The disk inside is similar to that found in a cassette tape but the medium is finer and so can store more data. The circular disk as no beginning or end so it has to be formatted in order that the computer knows where to look for the data that is stored on it. The PC based floppy disk stores only 1.44mB of data. This is too small for many tasks, for this reason the school is phasing out the use of floppy disk drives.

The floppy disk drive is pretty close to obsolete I doubt it will be on the syllabus for much longer.