What is the Difference between Hard Disk and Floppy Disk?  

FLOPPY DISK:A soft magnetic disk. It is called floppy because it flops if you wave it (at least, the 5¼-inch variety does). Unlike most hard disks, floppy disks (often called floppies or diskettes) are portable, because you can remove them from a disk drive. Disk drives for floppy disks are called floppy drives. Floppy disks are slower to access than hard disks and have less storage capacity, but they are much less expensive. And most importantly, they are portable. HARD DISK:A magnetic disk on which you can store computer data. The term hard is used to distinguish it from a soft, or floppy, disk. Hard disks hold more data and are faster than floppy disks. A hard disk, for example, can store anywhere from 10 to more than 100 gigabytes, whereas most floppies have a maximum storage capacity of 1.4 megabytes. A single hard disk usually consists of several platters. Each platter requires two read/write heads, one for each side. All the read/write heads are attached to a single access arm so that they cannot move independently. Each platter has the same number of tracks, and a track location that cuts across all platters is called a cylinder. For example, a typical 84 megabyte hard disk for a PC might have two platters (four sides) and 1,053 cylinders. In general, hard disks are less portable than floppies, although it is possible to buy removable hard disks.

Answered by Relax at 8:43 PM on November 14, 2007

A floppy disk is a rapidly ageing, if not already obsolete, form of portable storing and transferring data. A floppy disk is either 5" or 3.5", with the 3.5" being more advanced with larger storage space. Still, the maximum amount of space on a floppy is 1.44MB. A hard disk is a somewhat-obsolete term for a hard drive, which is the central storage of a computer. Hard drives can be external or internal and store all data present on a computer. They can range from 40GB and below to 1TB (1024 gigs) or higher. The term "hard Disk" was coined because hard drives are composed of rapidly rotating disks, unlike the floppy disk, which is a disk enclosed in a square piece of plastic/metal. The speed of a hard drive is dependant on the RPM (rotations per minute) of a hard drive, whilst a floppy's is static and constant.

Answered by quadeer at 8:26 PM on November 14, 2007

Using rigid disks and sealing the unit allows HDD to have much tighter tolerances than in a floppy disk drive. Consequently, hard disk drives can store much more data than floppy disk drives and access and transmit it faster. A typical enterprise, i.e. workstation HDD might store between 160 GB and 1 TB of data ,rotate at 7,200 or 10,000 RPM, and have a sequential media transfer rate of over 80 MB/s when compared to standard FDD Storage (1.44 MB) and data transfer rate of paltry 300 to 360 RPM. Floppy disk heads are larger and much less precise than hard disk heads, because the track density of a floppy disk is much lower than that of a hard disk. Hard disks have a track density of thousands of tracks per inch, while floppy disks have a track density of 135 tracks per inch or less.

Answered by A.R.Karthick at 8:12 PM on November 14, 2007

A floppy disk is a rapidly ageing, if not already obsolete, form of portable storing and transferring data. A floppy disk is either 5" or 3.5", with the 3.5" being more advanced with larger storage space. Still, the maximum amount of space on a floppy is 1.44MB. A hard disk is a somewhat-obsolete term for a hard drive, which is the central storage of a computer. Hard drives can be external or internal and store all data present on a computer. They can range from 40GB and below to 1TB (1024 gigs) or higher. The term "hard Disk" was coined because hard drives are composed of rapidly rotating disks, unlike the floppy disk, which is a disk enclosed in a square piece of plastic/metal. The speed of a hard drive is dependant on the RPM (rotations per minute) of a hard drive, whilst a floppy's is static and constant. Hope that helped.

Answered by alokgupta14 at 7:48 PM on November 14, 2007

A floppy disk is a rapidly ageing, if not already obsolete, form of portable storing and transferring data. A floppy disk is either 5" or 3.5", with the 3.5" being more advanced with larger storage space. Still, the maximum amount of space on a floppy is 1.44MB. A hard disk is a somewhat-obsolete term for a hard drive, which is the central storage of a computer. Hard drives can be external or internal and store all data present on a computer. They can range from 40GB and below to 1TB (1024 gigs) or higher. The term "hard Disk" was coined because hard drives are composed of rapidly rotating disks, unlike the floppy disk, which is a disk enclosed in a square piece of plastic/metal. The speed of a hard drive is dependant on the RPM (rotations per minute) of a hard drive, whilst a floppy's is static and constant. Hope that helped. HDDs record data by magnetizing a ferromagnetic material directionally, to represent either a 0 or a 1 binary digit. They read the data back by detecting the magnetization of the material. A typical HDD design consists of a spindle which holds one or more flat circular disks called platters, onto which the data is recorded. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually glass or aluminum, and are coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. Older disks used iron(III) oxide as the magnetic material, but current disks use a cobalt-based alloy. The platters are spun at very high speeds. Information is written to a platter as it rotates past mechanisms called read-and-write heads that operate very close over the magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetization of the material immediately under it. There is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm (or access arm) moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins. The arm is moved using a voice coil actuator or (in older designs) a stepper motor. The magnetic surface of each platter is divided into many small sub-micrometre-sized magnetic regions, each of which is used to encode a single binary unit of information. In today's HDDs each of these magnetic regions is composed of a few hundred magnetic grains. Each magnetic region forms a magnetic dipole which generates a highly localized magnetic field nearby. The write head magnetizes a magnetic region by generating a strong local magnetic field nearby. Early HDDs used an electromagnet both to generate this field and to read the data by using electromagnetic induction. Later versions of inductive heads included metal in Gap (MIG) heads and thin film heads. In today's heads, the read and write elements are separate but in close proximity on the head portion of an actuator arm. The read element is typically magneto-resistive while the write element is typically thin-film inductive.[4] In modern drives, the small size of the magnetic regions creates the danger that their magnetic state be lost because of thermal effects. To counter this, the platters are coated with two parallel magnetic layers, separated by a 3-atom-thick layer of the non-magnetic element ruthenium, and the two layers are magnetized in opposite orientation, thus reinforcing each other.[5] Another technology used to overcome thermal effects to allow greater recording densities is perpendicular recording, which has been used in some hard drives as of 2006. Hard disk drives are sealed to prevent dust and other sources of contamination from interfering with the operation of the hard disks heads. The hard drives are not air tight, but rather utilize an extremely fine air filter, to allow for air inside the hard drive enclosure. The spinning of the disks causes the air to circulate forcing any particulates to become trapped on the filter. The same air currents also act as a gas bearing which enables the heads to float

Answered by Urexpert at 7:47 PM on November 14, 2007