Beezid

Saturday, April 18, 2009

What is a Floppy disk drive? A Drive?

Posted by Hannah on 12:38 PM

What is a Floppy disk drive? What is A Drive?

Disk drives are part of your computer that actually stores your information - at times externally (outside the computer). At times you will get these disks that contain programs that you can load into your computer to use. Other times if you have a file (maybe a letter, spreadsheet, etc) that you would like to share with someone else you can copy this information onto a disk for the party to load onto their computer. I guess the short and the sweet version of disk drives? They are storage units!

Today we are going to show you what a Floppy Disk Drive, or 'A DRIVE' is!

Most computers have at least 3 disk drives, but some can have more or less. Your computer names those drives to identify them. Most of the time you will see see A, C and D drives. Normally if you see a B drive its additional floppy drive.

Floppy Drives look similar to this:

disk drive
The slit may be horizontal or vertical depending on how your computer is setup.
The above happens to be a 3.5" drive. The disk itself is 3.5" .

3.5 floppy disk

Keep in mind some computers have MORE than one of these drives, but Drive A is normally your floppy drive. Drive B can be the second one. Some of the newer computers no longer have floppy drive at all, so don't panic if you don't see it. Most programs are now distributed on CD's or CD roms.

floppy drive on computer

There are some older computers that also have the larger version of the floppy disk drive that is 5.25". You don't see these much anymore, but I used to use these to store my files on in college! Showing my age here?!

5.25 Floppy disk drive

I hope this lesson helped you identify what a floppy disk drive or 'a drive' is. If you have ANY questions please feel free to leave a comment on this blog. You can also enter your email below, and get sent new lessons as I get done writing them!

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