Half of the owners of personal computers do not even suspect that there is such a technology as magnetic recording, and the remaining half of users are sure that this recording, including the medium - a flexible magnetic disk, has sunk into oblivion. However, if you delve into this issue, you can find that manufacturers continue to produce magnetic disks and tapes. For what? Where does obsolete technology apply? The focus of this article is magnetic recording on various information carriers, advantages and disadvantages of 20th century technology.
History reference
Many media sources indicate that magnetic disks have replaced magnetic tapes as more compact media. It is not true. Actually floppy disks are substitutes for punch cards. And they cannot be competitors of magnetic tapes for one simple reason - their capacities are incommensurable.
The very first magnetic disk was manufactured by IBM, which in 1971 showed the world an eight-inch diskette and a disk drive capable of writing and reading data from a storage medium. The floppy disk capacity was one hundred kilobytes, which was quite enough to store and transfer data of that time. A few years later, five-and-a-quarter-inch media appeared on the market, and in 1981, the world-famous Sony concern introduced a 3.5-inch floppy disk on the market. Initially, the diskette was 720 kilobytes. But later, due to an increase in recording density, media with a capacity of 1.44 MB and 2.88 MB appeared.
And speaking of magnetic recording in general
Information can be transferred not only to a flexible magnetic disk, but also to film and hard media. The principle of recording on soft media is known to all. Recording on magnetic media is carried out sequentially. Accordingly, and reading should occur in the opposite way. This is for tape drives and is a huge minus. But there are pluses, because, thanks to the high recording density, one medium can store a large amount of information. An example of such devices are streamers. But writing to a hard drive allows you to access data much faster thanks to just two mechanisms - a rotating spindle that spins the surface of the data disk, and a moving information-reading head.
On top of fame
If the capacity of the flexible magnetic disks is limited by the surface area of the carrier, then the soft film can be wound on a reel half a kilometer long. What is actively and being done by manufacturers. In the 21st century, interest in streamers has not only not faded, but, on the contrary, has grown. Manufacturers are developing and improving new technologies for these devices. One such small medium with magnetic tape can record from 0.5 to 4 terabytes of information. Streamers are widely used in large corporations for storing database archives. In film studios on the media they place films sent to the archive. Administrators of large Internet resources on tape cartridges store backup copies of all important sites. And all this thanks to several positive qualities of the device, which so far have not been able to surpass any technology.
- Huge recording density with small media sizes.
- Low power consumption compared to similar high-capacity media.
- High reliability and stability.
The triumph that never took place
As you know, a monopoly on the market makes it possible to set its own prices, but one should not expect any grand development from products that have no analogues. It turned out that the little-known company Iomega Zip entered the IT technology market at the end of the 20th century with an innovation that had no analogues in the world. A disk drive and 3.5-inch floppy disks for it were introduced, allowing you to record data of 100, 250 and 750 megabytes in size on one medium. The price of such a device was so overpriced that not only ordinary users, but also huge corporations chose to refrain from buying. Due to low demand, the manufacturer did not immediately manage to find out that a damaged floppy disk crashes the drive. The development of technology was prevented by laser recording, information about which was not kept secret from other manufacturers.
The device and design of a flexible storage device
The word "floppy disk" is derived from the English word diskette, which, in turn, was short for floppy disk. Translated floppy means "flexible." As a result, literally - a flexible magnetic disk. What is called - figured out. It remains to understand its design. The principle of operation is reduced to the presence of a marked area on the surface of the carrier and head, capable of recording and reading, which is located in the drive. In addition, a special shaft is placed in the drive that rotates the floppy disk. Access to the surface of the magnetic medium is through a special window of the diskette, the length of which allows the head to move along the entire radius of the disk surface. To protect the magnetic surface, the window is protected by a special shutter that opens mechanically when a diskette is inserted into the drive. The absence of a curtain does not affect the operation of the device, but it can entail surface contamination, since the structure of the magnetic disk can attract dust to itself.
Principle of operation and small oddities
The principle of recording a magnetic layer on a flexible medium is quite interesting. In addition to the recording, the device has two control heads, which are located behind the main one and are shifted to the sides from each other. Their task is to protect the rewriting of information on tracks adjacent to the recording. If the writing magnetic head with a strong impulse affected the information nearby, then the control head cancels this change. It looks rather strange from the side. After all, if we take a hard magnetic disk for comparison, we can see that it has only one head for each surface of the disk. The fact is that the writing head, which is built into the drive of floppy disks, does not have high-frequency magnetization due to the complexity of its design. Therefore, such a simple and inexpensive solution was found.
The crowding out of technology from the IT market
Just a few years ago, when purchasing a personal computer, floppy disk drives were a mandatory attribute in the system unit. But the interest in the device among users quickly faded. And now, the presence of a 3.5-inch drive indicates that the owner of the PC has a weak computer. The reasons for this disappearance of flexible drives from the market are many. Here are a few of them.
- Small recording capacity. In fact, you cannot even record one song on a disc.
- Insecurity of information storage. A floppy disk is demagnetized under the influence of large magnetic fields. For example, a one-time trip on a trolley bus or subway can format a floppy disk.
- Even the stupidity launched in the media by the manufacturers of SSD drives about the dangerous effects of a hard magnetic disk and all drives with this technology has given its result.
Safety first
This may seem strange, but the floppy disk is very popular in US government, including the presidential administration. The magnetic disk is designed to authorize users when entering the control system. While the whole world has switched to the use of USB keys, America uses the technology of the last century. This approach is explained by the fact that very often, having taken possession of a USB key, a fraudster gains access to sensitive information. Many feature films reveal this problem in the plot.
With magnetic disks, everything is different. A major role is played by the advantages and disadvantages of floppy disks. In addition to low cost, small size, the ability to overwrite, quickly read, determine the media of any operating system without drivers, the advantage can be attributed to easy media failure. Naturally, without the possibility of recovery. This is the main advantage of a floppy disk. In the event of an unforeseen situation, the medium is easily destroyed along with important information. Obtaining a new key is not difficult, for this it is enough to contact the security service of your structure.
Education system
But Russian children know more about floppy disks than their parents. Indeed, most Russian schools still have on their balance personal computers with a built-in floppy disk drive. And thanks to school computer science programs, which have not undergone any significant changes in a few years, all students also get practical skills in using magnetic disks. After all, the volume of a floppy disk allows you to store two entry-level programming languages on one medium along with completed tasks for the entire year of study. And without a basic knowledge of the programming languages BASIC and Turbo Pascal, no technical university will open its doors to the applicant.
System Admin Tool
It is a flexible magnetic disk, and not a USB drive or optical disk, that the system administrator uses to update the firmware of system devices, servers and control systems. In addition, the floppy disk is used to transfer authorization keys, system settings of equipment, settings of controllers and arrays. Not to mention that the banal damage to the BIOS of any personal computer can be fixed either with a floppy disk or with a programmer. There are several reasons for the active use of a floppy disk.
- To read data from the media, use the drive built into the device, which does not need drivers for operation. No detections and settings.
- Cheaper than a drive and media with the same fault tolerance in the market for a decade there is nothing.
- There is no need for large amounts of information - 1.44 MB for Unix-based systems is enough to save the necessary data.
About the entertainment of programmers
Due to the fact that the structure of the magnetic disk is a spiral, the read head has to constantly move along the surface of the carrier. At the same time, the stepper motor that moves this head creates a specific sound in the drive, which is very audible in a large room. This is what programmers have been using for many years. Using one of the low-level programming languages (Turbo Pascal or C +), using special commands you can control the stepper motor of the device using sequential and short-term accesses of the computer to various data recorded across the entire disk. Many manage to reproduce a very complex melody with the help of several drives, each of which plays the role of a single instrument. In the media you can learn more about this type of entertainment.
Finally
There is only one conclusion: a flexible magnetic disk, like a hard disk, is too early to write off. Having worked in the IT field for about 25 years, floppy disks and hard drives remain in demand in many areas of human life. Along with the shortcomings that are attributed to these media, they also have many advantages that can be seen when trying to get to know the technology better. Naturally, you should not pay attention to the stupidity of foolish people who talk about the dangerous effects of a hard magnetic disk, and indeed the entire magnetic recording as a whole. All equipment, massively presented on the market, passes more than one certification before getting to the counter.