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A hard disk consists of two or more platters stacked on top of
one another and thus has four or more sides. In addition, a hard
disk has many more tracks per side than a diskette, but the
number of tracks depends on the capacity of the hard disk. The
number of sectors depends on the type of hard disk.
Your computer uses the read/write heads in a disk drive to store
and retrieve data on a disk. To write to a disk, the computer
spins it in the drive to position the disk so that the area where
the data is to be written is under the read/write head. A diskette
has an exposed area where the read/write head can access it.
Because data is stored magnetically, you can retrieve it, record
over it, and erase it-just as you play, record, and erase music
on a cassette tape.
Types of Diskette Drives
The top diskette drive in your computer is either a 5
‘/+inch,
1.2MB drive or a 3
‘/z-inch,
1.44MB drive. You may also have a
second diskette drive, and it may be the same type or it may be
different. The following list describes the four types of diskette
drives you can use in your computer and which diskettes to use
with them:
0
1.2MB drive-With this drive, use 5
‘/+inch,
double-sided,
high-density, 96 TPI (tracks per inch), 1.2MB diskettes.
These diskettes contain 80 tracks per side, 15 sectors per
track, and hold up to 1.2MB of information, which is
approximately 500 pages of text.
Note
MB stands for megabyte, which equals 1024KB (or
1,048,576 bytes). KB stands for kilobyte, which equals
1024 bytes. Each byte represents a single character, such
as A, $, or 3.
3-12
Using Your Computer