A floppy diskette wobbles as it rotates. Tiny circles are the magnetized particles that represent stored bits.
Formatting and storing data on a floppy diskette.
Types of floppy diskettes and drives.
Because the diskette is floppy, it wobbles as it rotates. Wobbling causes that the diskette surface at any given time may be far away from the drive’s read/write head. This implies that strong magnetic fields are needed for read/write operations. The use of strong magnetic fields dictates that the magnetized particles of the storage medium should be placed far enough from one another to avoid the overlapping of their magnetic fields. Thus, the diskette has low storage capacity. To minimize wobbling, the drive’s rotating speed should be kept low (300 rpm = 300 rotations per minute). Thus, the drive is slow (long access time). To simplify the read/write mechanism, before usage, the diskette has to be partitioned (formatted) into concentric circles (tracks) with each track being divided into the same number of slices (sectors). Also, each sector stores the same amount of bits. Types of diskettes and drives are shown.
