Tuesday 19 January 2021

Types of Magnetic Disks: Floppies, Hard Disks - Zip/Bernoulli, Disk Pack and Winchester

 

Types of Magnetic Disks:

 

All magnetic disks are round platters. They come in different sizes, use different types of packaging, and are made of a rigid metal or flexible plastic. Based on these differences, there are many types of magnetic disks available today.


Secondary Storage Devices Classification


Floppy Disks:

 

A floppy disk is a flat, circular base or flexible plastic coated with magnetic oxide. It is encased in a square plastic or vinyl jacket cover. The jacket gives handling protection to the disk surface. Moreover, it has a special liner that provides a weeping action to remove dust particles, as they are harmful to the disk surface and the read/write head.

 

Floppy disks are so called because they are made of flexible plastic plates that can bend. They are also known as a floppies or diskettes.  They were introduced by IBM in 1972 and are now produced in various sizes and capacities by many manufacturers.

 

 

Floppy Disk Drive:

 

A floppy disk drive is a device used to read/ write data from/ to a floppy disk. It has a spindle to mount and rotate the disk, and read/ write heads to read/write data to/from the disk. Unlike hard disk drives, the read/write heads of a floppy disk drive make direct contact with the disk surface during data reading/ writing.

 

3 ½ inch Floppy Disk:

 

It is the most commonly used floppy disk. It consists of a 3 ½ inch diameter disk encased in a square, hard plastic jacket cover. The jacket cover has a cut-out (aperture) for read/write head to make contact with disk surface. This aperture is covered with a sliding metal piece.


Floppy disk


When a floppy disk is inserted in a floppy disk drive for use, the metal piece slides back to expose the disk’s surface to the drive’s read write/head.

 

All 3 ½ inch floppy disks are of double-sided type that record data on both disk surfaces. However, they come in three different capacities - double density, high density, and very high density. The double density 3 ½  inch  diskettes have 40 tracks, 18 sectors/track, and 512 bytes/sector, giving a total disk storage capacity of 2( for two surfaces) x 40 x 18 x 512 = 720 KB (approx.). The high density 3 ½  inch diskettes have 80  tracks, 36 sectors/track, and 512 bytes/sector, giving it total disk storage capacity of 2.88 MB (approx.).

 

Hard Disks:

 

Hard disks are the primary online secondary storage device for most computer systems today. They are made of rigid metal (aluminium) platters and come in many sizes ranging from 1 to 14 inch diameter.

 

Types of Hard Disks:

 

Depending on how they are packaged, hard disks are normally categorized into three types:

 

1.    Zip/Bernoulli disk:

 

It consists of a single hard disk platter encased in a plastic cartridge. The disk is commonly of 3 ½ inch size having storage capacity of about 100 MB.  The storage capacity slightly varies depending on the formatting style used by a computer system with which it is used. It’s disk drive, called zip drive, maybe of portable or a fixed type. The fixed type is part of a computer system permanently connected to it. The portable type can be brought and connected to a computer system for the duration of use and can then be disconnected and taken away. A zip disk can be easily loaded/unloaded into a zip drive just as we insert/ remove a floppy disk drive or a video cassette in a VCR.

 

2.   Disk Pack:

 

It consists of multiple (two or more) hard disk platters mounted on a single central shaft. All the disks revolve together at the same speed. Its disk drive has a separate read/write head for each usable disk surface. Its disk drive is of interchangeable type and allows loading/unloading of different disk packs as and when they are to be used. When not in use, a disk pack is stored offline in a plastic case. This gives virtually unlimited storage capacity to disk packs.


Disk Pack


3.   Winchester Disk:

 

A Winchester disk consists of multiple (two or more) hard disk platters mounted on a single central shaft. However, unlike a disk pack drive, a Winchester disk drive is of fixed type. Its hard disk platters and a disk drive are sealed together in a contamination free container and cannot be separated from each other. Hence, Winchester disk have limited capacity. However, for the same number of disks platters of the same size, Winchester disk can have larger storage capacity than disk packs due to following reasons:

 

  1. As both disk platters and disk drive are permanently sealed together, all surfaces of all disk platters (including the upper surface of the topmost platter and the lower surface of the bottommost platter) are used for data recording in a Winchester disk.
  2. The contamination free environment allows Winchester disks to employee greater precision of data recording and accessing, resulting in greater data storage density than interchangeable disk packs.

 

 

Winchester disks were so named after the 30-30 Winchester rifle because the early Winchester disk systems had two 30MB disks. Storage capacity for today's Winchester disks ranges from a few tens of megabytes to a few gigabyte.


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