3.5 inch floppy drive is the place where you out the cute little disk. :) 1. When a disk is inserted the metal cover is pushed open to show the inside called the cookie. The disk is coated with a magnetic material. 2. The two read/write heads one on the top and one on the bottom are very close to the disk and send magnetic pulses that change the polarity of the particles on the disk when writing. 3. The drive's circuit board gets signals from the computer and sends them to the head as signals that control the heads movement. Meanwhile a motor attaches itself to the middle of the disk and spins it. Another motor called a stepper motor turns moves the head back and forth over the disk. 4. On a disk there is a little tab that determines whether you write to the disk, if the tab is pushed up the disk will not write if it is down it will write to the disk. The drive determines if it can write to the disk by shining a little light through the hole, if it senses the light it will not write to the disk, if it does not sense the light it will allow you to write on the disk. 5. The heads make electrical impulses that magnetizes the head and allows it to write data to the disk. To read the data the head sense the magnetic fields made by the magnetic particles in the cookie. |