Floppy Disk Drives

In some ways, they are kind-of the same. But there are significant differences. Consider that data organization on a computer has been fashioned after what you might find in an office:

An office may have a bunch of related papers. In a computer file system, those papers would be individually identified as files.

The papers are stored in a folder. On a computer, files are stored in a folder, or, directory.

The office folder is stored, along with other related folders, in a drawer of a filing cabinet. In a computer, a drive is analogous to the drawer of the office filing cabinet. The drive, usually identified by a unique letter of the English alphabet, is a volume, or partition. Files and folders in the "folder" of the drive itself are said to be in the root folder.

The office filing cabinet may have multiple drawers. Together, the drawers form a filing cabinet. In a computer, a drive may be one of several volumes (partitions) available on a physical disk. So, the disk itself may be thought of as the filing cabinet.

A drive and a folder on a computer have these things in common:

• Both can store other folders within.
• Both can store files within.
• Both can only be one type of file system.
• Both can have a recorded date of creation.

A drive and a computer folder have these differences:

• The drive is the top-level entity of a disk volume. A folder always has a parent folder, but a drive does not.
• Drives are usually identified by a single letter of the English alphabet. A folder can have most any name, according to the conventions of the file system.
• Folders can have file attributes (like Read-Only, Hidden, Modified Date, etc.) that a drive itself cannot have.
• A drive can have a volume label that identifies the volume. The volume label does not need to be unique. Some drives can also have additional properties, like a quasi-original serial number.
• A drive's letter must be unique in the system to which it's attached (mounted). A folder must have a unique name in the folder it's in, but there can be any number of identically-named folders in other folders.
• A folder (or file) cannot exist without a drive, but the reverse is not true.
• As a drive represents a complete volume (partition), the file system's organization of data relies on it. The entire structure of all files and folders on a drive is stored internally as a part of the drive's data. Formatting a drive initializes this data structure, destroying it if it already exists. You cannot format a folder.
• The "folder" representing a drive is called the root folder (of the drive). No regular folder can be addressed as such. The root folder cannot be deleted, but all of the files and folders in the root folder can be deleted.
• A drive can be released from the system it's attached to, which is called dismounting it. A folder cannot be dismounted, only deleted.
• Some file systems allow mounting a drive as a sub-folder of another drive. In this case, the mounted drive's root folder logically becomes the sub-folder of the other drive. But in reality, the two volumes remain physically separate. One of the volumes can be destroyed or corrupted without affecting the other. The volume that's mounted can still be addressed separately by a unique drive letter.
• A host system may require a special device driver in order to access a drive. A folder is a figment of the drive's file system, and requires no drivers.

De Fragment

Windows 7:

1. Click on the start button click computer

2. Once your on the document screen named computer click the hard drive to De fragment.

3. Right click the icon and click properties once there click the tab called Tools

4. Click "De Fragment Now"

Windows XP:

1. Click the start button, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter.
2. Click the volume that you want to defragment.
3. Click De-fragment to begin the DeFragment.

- I Hope This Helped

Because it is easily erased because it is on magnetic tape so if it were to go near a magnet it would be erased.

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They may also degrade with time - but whether that is more serious than the computer manufacturers making the equipment obsolete within only a few years so you can't read them anyway, I'll leave others to decide!

I still use floppy disks for backing up some small files, like Word Documents, Text Files, and small "WAV file sound effects when I don't have any CDs or my flash drive is full.

I still have some old DOS games on floppy that I still play sometimes, though I have them backed up on CD, but I still play the games on Floppy if I can't find the CD.

I also maintain an Emergency Boot Disk, in case my computer crashes or gets hit by a virus and I need to go into DOS to resurrect the computer.

My School has older computers in the Social Studies computer lab that has computers with floppy disks, but I've never used them, I have a Pen drive for that! But I've seen the School IT guy use them to keep these old machines going.

My current Workplace has a few older printing presses that need to be "calibrated" using 4 unmarked floppy disks, in order, or the margins will be off and that docked from your pay. Luckily they copies of copies of copies of the original disks and they are different colors, so they always go Yellow-Blue-Black-Grey, Yellow-Blue-Black-Grey, etc.

The U.S. Government has a protocol that sensitive, classified military documents, such as Nuclear Defense Information, that was written in the 1980s, when floppy disks were the only way to distribute computer information. It would cost so much to transfer all the information to a more modern format, dispose of the old disks and write new protocol that they continue to use floppy disks to distribute this information in 2010 as they did in the 1980s.

There are a lot of older technology still in daily use that requires the use of floppy disks, like industrial equipment and cash registers. I went shopping early at a thrift store (shortly after they opened) once and I had to wait for them to boot the register from 3 floppy disks to buy some clothes, this was in 2008, too!

I remember saving some songs I had composed on an electric keyboard using a integrated floppy disk and could play them as "MIDI" files either on the keyboard or on my computer! But that was back in 2003.

Older digital cameras store their pictures on a floppy disk, also. Most of those cameras are of better quality than the modern, cheap flash-based digital cameras, film-like without the film. Though many of these have been abandoned in favor of new, flsh-based cameras.

Many Developing and Third-World countries use older, obsolete computers that have no other way to transfer and store data than floppy drives, after the developed world deemed them to be "obsolete" and were considered "junk" their still serving Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Islands as daily work-horses in homes, schools, hospitals, businesses and government offices.

As you can see floppy disks are still used, just usually as a legacy system, once all these technologies clunk out, they will be obsolete.