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Hardware components of the PC
Operating on the same principle of magnetic spinning disks, the differences between hard drives and floppy drives are capacity, speed of access, and the fact that a hard drive is not removable, unless mounted in a removable caddy. The hard drive is referred to as the fixed disk because its internal spinning disks are not removable like the floppy diskettes are. The hard drive is the most common storage device in a computer because of its ability to store relatively large amounts of data upwards in size from 4GB compared to the 1.44MB limit of the floppy diskette. Another advantage the hard drive has is its speed of operation. The combination of faster disk rotation speeds with faster seek times (the time it takes the read/ write heads to move from track to track) means that the overall speed is an order of magnitude faster than that of the floppy drive. |