Flexible magnetic disk: structure, advantages and disadvantages. What is a floppy disk?

Half of the owners of personal computers do not even suspect that there is such a technology as magnetic recording, and the remaining half of users are sure that this record, including the carrier - a flexible magnetic disk, has sunk into oblivion. However, if you go into this issue, you can find out that the manufacturing plants continue to produce magnetic disks and tapes. For what? Where is the obsolete technology used? The focus of this article is magnetic recording on different media, advantages and disadvantages of 20th century technology.

Historical reference

Many sources of mass media indicate that magnetic disks replaced magnetic tapes as more compact media. It is not true. In fact, floppy disks are substitutes for punch cards. And they can not compete with magnetic tapes for one simple reason - their capacities are incommensurable.

The very first magnetic disk was released by IBM, which in 1971 showed the world an eight-inch floppy disk and a drive capable of recording and reading data from a storage medium. The diskette capacity was one hundred kilobytes, which was quite enough for storing and transferring data of that time. A few years later, the market appeared carrier of five and a quarter inches, and in 1981 the world-famous concern Sony introduced a 3.5-inch floppy disk in the market. Initially, the diskette size was 720 kilobytes. But later, due to the increase in the recording density, there appeared carriers with a capacity of 1.44 MB and 2.88 MB.

And if we talk about magnetic recording in general

The transfer of information can be carried out not only on a flexible magnetic disk, but also on a film and rigid media. The principle of the action of recording on a soft carrier is known to all. Recording to a magnetic medium is carried out sequentially. Accordingly, the reading must also take place in the opposite way. This is for tape drives and is a huge minus. But there are pluses, because, due to the high density of recording, one medium can store a large amount of information. Examples of such devices are streamers. But recording on a hard drive allows access to data much faster thanks to only two mechanisms - a rotating spindle that spins the surface of the data disc and a moving information-reading head.

At the height of glory

If the capacity of flexible magnetic disks is limited by the surface area of the carrier, then the soft film can be wound onto a reel length from half a kilometer. What is actively being done by the manufacturing plants. In the 21st century, interest in streamers not only did not fade away, but, on the contrary, grew. Manufacturers develop and improve new technologies for these devices. One such small tape drive can store from 0.5 to 4 terabytes of information. Streamers are widely used in large corporations to store database archives. In the film studios on the media place films sent to the archive. Administrators of large Internet resources on the cartridge to the tape drive store backup copies of all important sites. And all this thanks to several positive features of the device, which so far have not been able to surpass any technology.

1. Huge recording density for small media sizes.
2. Low power consumption compared to similar high-capacity media.
3. High reliability and stability.

Triumph, which never took place

As you know, the monopoly in the market makes it possible to set its own prices, but it is not worth expecting any grandiose development from products that have no analogues. It so happened that the little-known company Iomega Zip entered the IT technology market at the end of the 20th century with an innovation that had no analogues in the world. The disk drive and 3.5-inch floppy disk drives to it were presented, allowing to record data of 100, 250 and 750 megabytes in size on one medium. The price of such a device was so overstated that not only ordinary users, but huge corporations preferred to refrain from buying. Because of the low demand, the manufacturer did not immediately know that the damaged diskette disables the drive. To develop technology prevented laser recording, information about which was not classified from other manufacturers.

The device and design of a flexible information storage device

The word "floppy disk" was derived from the English word diskette, which in turn became an abbreviation for the floppy disk. In translation, floppy means "flexible". As a result, literally - a flexible magnetic disk. As they say - figured out. It remains to understand its construction. The principle of action is reduced to the presence of a marked area on the surface of the carrier and the head, capable of recording and reading, which is located in the drive. In addition, the drive has a special shaft that rotates the floppy disk. Access to the surface of the magnetic carrier is through a special window of the floppy disk, the length of which allows the head to move along the entire radius of the surface of the disk. To protect the magnetic surface, the window is protected by a special shutter, which opens mechanically when the floppy disk is inserted into the drive. The absence of a curtain on the operability of the device is not affected, but can lead to contamination of the surface, since the structure of the magnetic disk is able to attract dust to itself.

Principle of operation and small oddities

The principle of recording a magnetic layer on a flexible medium is quite interesting. In addition to the recording, there are two control heads in the device, which are behind the main one and are shifted apart from each other. Their task is to protect the overwriting of information on the tracks that are next to the recording. If the writing magnetic head has affected the information nearby by a strong pulse, then the control head cancels this change. It looks rather strange from the outside. After all, if you take a hard disk for comparison, you can see that it has only one head for each disk surface. The fact is that the writing head built into the floppy drive does not have a high-frequency bias due to the complexity of its design. Therefore, such a simple and inexpensive solution was found.

The displacement of technology from the IT market

Literally a few years ago, when buying a personal computer, a mandatory attribute in the system unit was a floppy disk drive. But the interest in the device from users quickly faded. And now the presence of a 3.5-inch drive indicates that the owner of the PC has a weak computer. The reasons for this disappearance of flexible drives from the market are many. Here are a few of them.

1. Small capacity for recording. In fact, one song can not be recorded on the disc.
2. Unreliable storage of information. The diskette is demagnetized by the action of large magnetic fields. For example, a one-time trip on a trolley or subway, is able to format a floppy disk.
3. Even the stupidity, launched in the media by SSD-drive manufacturers about the dangerous effects of a hard magnetic disk and all drives with this technology, gave its result.

Safety first

This may seem strange, but the diskette is very popular in US government structures, including the presidential administration. The magnetic disk is designed to authorize users to enter the management system. While the whole world switched to the use of USB-keys, America uses the technology of the last century. This approach is explained by the fact that very often, having captured the USB-key, the fraudster gets access to the private information. A lot of feature films reveal this problem in the plot.

With magnetic disks it's different. A great role is played simultaneously by the advantages and disadvantages of floppy disks. In addition to low cost, small size, the ability to rewrite, quickly read, determine the carrier of any operating system without drivers, the advantage is easy removal of the media. Naturally, without the possibility of restoration. This is the main advantage of the floppy disk. In the event of an unforeseen situation, the media can be easily destroyed along with important information. Get the same new key will not be difficult, for this it is enough to contact the security service of its structure.

Education system

But Russian children know more about floppies than their parents. After all, most Russian schools still have on their balance personal computers with a built-in drive for flexible magnetic disks. And thanks to the school programs on computer science, which for a few years have not changed much, all students receive and practical skills in using magnetic disks. After all, the volume of the diskette allows you to store on one carrier two programming languages of the entry level, together with the completed tasks for the entire year of training. And without a basic knowledge of programming languages BASIC and Turbo Pascal, no technical college will open its doors to the entrant.

System Administrator Tool

It is a flexible magnetic disk, not a USB drive or optical disk, that the system administrator uses to update the firmware of system devices, servers and control systems. In addition, the floppy disk is used for transferring authorization keys, system hardware settings, setting up controllers and arrays. Not to mention the fact that the banal damage to the BIOS of any PC can be fixed either with a floppy disk or with a programmer. There are several reasons for the active use of a flexible magnetic disk.

1. To read data from the media, a built-in disk drive is used, which does not require drivers for operation. No detections and settings.
2. Cheaper disk drive and a carrier with the same fault tolerance in the market for the past decade there is nothing.
3. No need for large amounts of information - 1.44 MB for Unix-based systems is enough to save the necessary data.

About the Entertainment of Programmers

Due to the fact that the structure of the magnetic disk is a spiral, the reading head has to constantly move along the surface of the carrier. In this case, the stepping motor that moves this head creates a specific sound in the drive that is very well audible in a large room. This is what programmers have been using for many years. Using one of the low-level programming languages (Turbo Pascal or C +), with the help of special commands it is possible to control the stepper motor of the device with the help of consecutive and short-term calls of the computer to different data recorded over the entire disk. Many people manage to reproduce a very complex melody with the help of several drives, each of which serves as a single instrument. In the media, you can learn more about this type of entertainment.

Finally

The conclusion suggests one: a flexible magnetic disk, like hard, is too early to write off. Having worked in the IT sphere for about 25 years, diskettes and hard disks remain in demand in many spheres of human activity. Along with the shortcomings that are attributed to these carriers of information, they have many advantages that can be seen when trying to get to know technology more closely. Naturally, do not pay attention to the stupidity of people who are close to you, who talk about the dangerous effects of a hard magnetic disk, and the whole magnetic recording as a whole. All equipment, massively presented in the market, passes not one certification, before to get on the counter.