1. Floppy Disk Drives Almost a dead deal

2. The Basics Media/plastic/media Spins at 360 rpm Read/Write heads contact the disk surface – so dont pull a floppy while the activity light is on

3. Formatting Electronic map for storing data/files on the disk Concentric circles – tracks Slice up tracks to get sectors; each sector holds 512 Bytes of data Sets up four areas: boot record, File Allocation Table (FAT), Root Directory and Data Area Formatting is different for different devices (PCs, Macs, Sewing Machines, …)

4. Mac and PC disks Mac drives have two motors: spindle and eject/insert Spindle motor is variable speed on Macs Macs can read and write PC disks PCs cant read or write Mac disks

5. Types of Disks You can still find Double-sided, Double density (760 Bytes) disks – DD for short Most are Double-sided, High density – HD So much hassle over formatting that they come already formatted now

6. Installing Floppy Drives A: or B: - reserved by Windows for floppy drives Connect with 34-pin ribbon cable

7. Installing, cont. Red stripe is Pin 1 Get the connector backwards, drive light will stay on, but drive wont work. No harm to system. Be careful with power connector – get that upside down and you cook the drive

8. CMOS Should automatically detect drive Swap Floppy Device setting allows A to B swap – only if you have two drives Boot Up Floppy Seek – disable to save two seconds during POST 1/2

9. Boot Sequence Where will I find an OS? I set CD first, then floppy then hard disk drive Often have to poke around in CMOS to find where you set this

10. Maintenance I keep a floppy drive cleaner disk Too much use, or too little use and drive heads will need cleaning Dont poke around with a Q-Tip 6

11. Troubleshooting Drive wont read floppy disk Take disk to another computer Try another floppy disk (known good) Clean the read/write heads Replace the drive

12. USB floppy drives Popular for laptops Cant boot from them – need USB drivers to load first 4

13. Flash Memory Drives Thumb drive, Jump Drive, Flash drive Gaining in popularity daily Replacing Zip/floppy drives Is 4G still the upper limit?

14. CompactFlash (CF) Oldest, most complex and physically largest of memory cards. Can also get a microdrive in CF II form factor 2

15. SmartMedia After CF Used in digital cameras for a while Almost extinct now

16. Secure Digital (SD) Newest on the block Most common format used today SD and SDIO formats – not interchangeable Mini and Micro show up in cellular phones