Magnetic Disks

Magnetic disks come in two flavors: floppy and hard (called fixed by IBM). Both types
of disks use magnetic media and both are block-oriented devices with a block size of
512 bytes (in the Wintel49 architecture). The magnetic material coats each surface of a
circular disk, and information is written and read from this surface using read/write heads
much like the read/write heads in an audio tape record but manufactured, of course, to
much higher tolerances and specifications.
Floppy disks are constructed from mylar, or similar plastic material which provides the
support for the ferrous-oxide based magnetic media. Originally these disks were
developed for IBM mainframes and were 8 inches in diameter. They were then shrunk
to 5.25 inches in the mainframe environment and then adapted to the emerging personal
computer market. Both the 8" and 5.25" disks were sealed in a tevlar envelope which
protected them somewhat from environmental damage. The envelopes were not rigid,
however, and did not protect them from being bent, folded or similar mistreatment. IBM
then developed the 3.5 inch floppy disk which used the same support and magnetic
media, but was now housed in a hard plastic case. A metal slide which protects the disk
when not in use is slid aside when inserted into a disk drive, allowing the read/write
heads access to the surface of the media. When in use, the disks spin at a speed of
360rpm and the heads are in contact with the magnetic media when reading or writing is
taking place. Floppy disks are removable media.
The common 3.5" floppy disk currently in use holds 1.44 MB of data on the two surfaces
of a single disk.
Other, proprietary, floppy drives of much higher capacity are available, such as Iomegas
Zip drives which come in 100 MB and 250 MB capacities.
Hard Disks use fundamentally the same sort of magnetic media for holding data, but the
media coats rigid aluminum disks rather than floppy plastic disks. They also come in a
variety of disk diameters, from very large diameter (16") disks used on mainframe
systems to disks the size of a quarter which can fit into a laptops PCMCIA slot. Note
that physical size is not an indication of capacity, as these tiny quarter-sized drives
currently can hold over a gigabyte of storage. The hard drives are generally hermetically
sealed inside a case to prevent any contaminants from resting on the surfaces. This is
due to the fact that when in use the heads do not come in contact with surface of the
disks, but float aerodynamically just above the surface. They fly so close to the
surface, however, and the disk spins so fast50 that any object such as a dust mote or a
hair on the surface will cause the head to crash into the surface, destroying any data in
its path51. The rotational speed of a hard drive can vary, and has increased as
technology has improved. The original speed of a hard disk was 3,600rpm (10 times the
speed of a floppy drive). The most common speeds are currently 5,600rpm and
7,200rpm, but there are drives which spin at a speed of 10,000rpm.
Unlike floppy disks, hard disk drives generally have more than one platter and, hence
more than two surfaces. There is a read/write head for each surface, and the number of
heads is an important parameter in both the size of the drive and the accessing of data
on the drive. Hard disks in mainframes were frequently removable media, but up until
recently they were fixed in desktop computers. It has recently become fashionable,
however, to install hard drives in removable carriers, or mobile carriers, which can be
unplugged from the system and either replaced or be moved to another system.