Floppy Disk Drives

Almost a dead deal

The Basics

• Media/plastic/media

• Spins at 360 rpm

• Read/Write heads contact the disk surface – so don’t pull a floppy while the activity light is on

Formatting

• Electronic map for storing data/files on the disk• Concentric circles – tracks• Slice up tracks to get sectors; each sector holds

512 Bytes of data• Sets up four areas: boot record, File Allocation

Table (FAT), Root Directory and Data Area• Formatting is different for different devices (PCs,

Macs, Sewing Machines, …)

Mac and PC disks

• Mac drives have two motors: spindle and eject/insert

• Spindle motor is variable speed on Macs

• Macs can read and write PC disks

• PCs can’t read or write Mac disks

Types of Disks

• You can still find Double-sided, Double density (760 Bytes) disks – DD for short

• Most are Double-sided, High density – HD

• So much hassle over formatting that they come already formatted now

Installing Floppy Drives

• A: or B: - reserved by Windows for floppy drives

• Connect with 34-pin ribbon cable

Installing, cont.

• Red stripe is Pin 1

• Get the connector backwards, drive light will stay on, but drive won’t work. No harm to system.

• Be careful with power connector – get that upside down and you cook the drive

CMOS

• Should automatically detect drive

• Swap Floppy Device setting allows A to B swap – only if you have two drives

• Boot Up Floppy Seek – disable to save two seconds during POST

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Boot Sequence

• Where will I find an OS?

• I set CD first, then floppy then hard disk drive

• Often have to poke around in CMOS to find where you set this

Maintenance

• I keep a floppy drive cleaner disk

• Too much use, or too little use and drive heads will need cleaning

• Don’t poke around with a Q-Tip

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Troubleshooting

• Drive won’t read floppy disk

• Take disk to another computer

• Try another floppy disk (known good)

• Clean the read/write heads

• Replace the drive

USB floppy drives

• Popular for laptops

• Can’t boot from them – need USB drivers to load first

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Flash Memory Drives

• Thumb drive, Jump Drive, Flash drive

• Gaining in popularity daily

• Replacing Zip/floppy drives

• Is 4G still the upper limit?

CompactFlash (CF)

• Oldest, most complex and physically largest of memory cards.

• Can also get a microdrive in CF II form factor

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SmartMedia

• After CF

• Used in digital cameras for a while

• Almost extinct now

Secure Digital (SD)

• Newest on the block

• Most common format used today

• SD and SDIO formats – not interchangeable

• Mini and Micro show up in cellular phones