How do floppy disks hard drives CDs and DVDs compare in storage capacity?

Answer 1

They hardly compare technically, its like trying to compare a million square foot multilevel warehouse to matchbox.

Starting out with 5.25" floppies (I still have a working unit in my full tower for posterity), they hold about half a megabyte (525 kilobytes off the top of my head). Then came the 3.5" floppies, up to a whopping 1.44 megabytes, nearly tripling the 5.25's. Then we were starting to see hard drives, my first was 500 megabytes, now they're into terabytes, and for way less money than their ancestors. CD's, 700 megabytes, 800 on an overburn with the right media and burner. DVD's, between 4.7 gigabytes, and up to 2x, or 4x that amount on dual-layered and dual-layered/dual-sided discs, respectively.

The simple math: 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte; 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte; 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte; 1024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte. I won't go into petabytes :-) Everything is in multiples of 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. Kinda confusing that 'kilo' means 'thousand', yet everything jumps to the next term at 1024.

In direct comparison, one CD could hold as much information as roughly 486 1.44" floppies, or you could put nearly 7 CD's on a 4.7gigabyte DVD. (4.7 [gb]x 1024 [mb] / 700 [mb] = 6.875). A 2 terabyte hdd (2048 gigabytes) could hold between 256 and 435 full-length/full-quality DVD's, or even more if compression is used. Keep in mind, all media has less actual storage capacity than stated. The bigger the rated storage capacity of any media, the more information needed to define the storage 'areas' (file system/directories). For example, a 250gb hdd will 'format out' to roughly 232gb of usable space under NTFS (Windows NT File System).

I hope I either helped answer your question to your satisfaction, or at the very least made your brains percolate. There is plenty of information, as well as some tables available with a Google images search that might help explain it better than I can.

Answer 2

They hardly compare technically, its like trying to compare a million square foot multilevel warehouse to matchbox.

Starting out with 5.25" floppies (I still have a working unit in my full tower for posterity), they hold about half a megabyte (525 kilobytes off the top of my head). Then came the 3.5" floppies, up to a whopping 1.44 megabytes, nearly tripling the 5.25's. Then we were starting to see hard drives, my first was 500 megabytes, now they're into terabytes, and for way less money than their ancestors. CD's, 700 megabytes, 800 on an overburn with the right media and burner. DVD's, between 4.7 gigabytes, and up to 2x, or 4x that amount on dual-layered and dual-layered/dual-sided discs, respectively.

The simple math: 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte; 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte; 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte; 1024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte. I won't go into petabytes :-) Everything is in multiples of 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. Kinda confusing that 'kilo' means 'thousand', yet everything jumps to the next term at 1024.

In direct comparison, one CD could hold as much information as roughly 486 1.44" floppies, or you could put nearly 7 CD's on a 4.7gigabyte DVD. (4.7 [gb]x 1024 [mb] / 700 [mb] = 6.875). A 2 terabyte hdd (2048 gigabytes) could hold between 256 and 435 full-length/full-quality DVD's, or even more if compression is used. Keep in mind, all media has less actual storage capacity than stated. The bigger the rated storage capacity of any media, the more information needed to define the storage 'areas' (file system/directories). For example, a 250gb hdd will 'format out' to roughly 232gb of usable space under NTFS (Windows NT File System).

I hope I either helped answer your question to your satisfaction, or at the very least made your brains percolate. There is plenty of information, as well as some tables available with a Google images search that might help explain it better than I can.