CIT 1100

In this chapter, you will learn how to  Describe floppy drives  Explain how hard drives work  Describe current optical disc technologies

 Floppy disk drives (FDDs) are mechanical devices used to read and write data from and to a magnetic disk called a floppy diskette  The 3.5" drive has been available for personal computers since the mid-1980s  Floppy disks are becoming obsolete due to availability of inexpensive thumb drives

Even though floppy drives are considered obsolete they’re still being used on older systems  An understanding of floppy drive technology is helpful in understanding hard drive technology since they have many similarities  They stored only 1.44 MB of data, a fraction of what newer thumb drives can handle

Data was transferred using a wide ribbon cable with a 34 pin connector Power is provided to the drive using a four-pin Berg power connector

Hard drives are used to store data and programs  They are the primary data storage device in almost every computer  Most hard drives are mechanical, newer faster solid state drives are slowly replacing mechanical drives  Hard drive disks-called platters- are encased in metal

Features that set one hard drive apart from another -  The platter rotation speed makes a big difference in overall data transfer rates  The size of optional cache helps overall performance  Once they spin up, the platters inside a hard drive spin at a constant speed, called the rotation speed  The common speeds, in revolutions per minute (rpm), are 3600,5400, and 7200, up to as high as 10,000  The standard for almost every computer is 7200 rpm  Slower drives are older or used for portable computers since slower rotational drives draw less power

Connecting Hard Drives  There are two types of hard drive connections  The old style, called parallel ATA (PATA)  Used a 40- or 80-wire ribbon cable for data transfer All PATA drives use a 4 pin MOLEX connector to deliver power to the drive

Connectors are KEYED so they can’t be accidently plugged in backwards PATA hard drives are being phased out in favor of SATA Drives  Initially SATA Drives were manufactured to incorporate the same MOLEX power connector used by PATA  Newer releases use a five-wire SATA power connector

An optical disc is a 120-mm storage device that is read in a corresponding optical drive  Audio-only compact discs (CDs) were first released in1982  CDs were first used with computers 3 years later with the CD-ROM format  Most computers had CD-ROM drives by the early 1990s to go along with 3.5" floppy drives  Unlike floppy drive technology, optical drive manufacturers have continued to develop the standards for storing data CDs and DVDs

 CD-ROM  CD-R  CD-RW  DVD-ROM  DVD-R  DVD+R  DVD-RW  DVD+RW  BD-ROM  BD-R  BD-RE Different formats of optical discs: Compact Disc Digital Versatile Disc Blu-ray Disc Read-only Write-Once Rewrite Read-only Read-only Write-Once Write-Once Rewrite Rewrite Write-Once Rewrite DVD+RW DVD manufactures created an alphabet soup of competing standards now they are all marketed as Multi Drives 700 MB Storage 4.7GB/8.5GB Storage 25GB/50 GB Storage

Just like Hard drives Optical drives connect using the same techniques