Apple 145B manual Floppy disks and hard disks

Floppy disks and hard disks

Both floppy disks and hard disks function like filing cabinets: you use them to store information. You can store much more on a hard disk than on a floppy disk, however, and the computer can retrieve information from a hard disk much faster.

Floppy disks and hard disks are represented by different icons.

The disk whose icon is closest to the upper-right corner of your desktop is the startup disk, which contains the information the Macintosh uses to operate.

Your hard disk is sealed into the hard disk drive inside your computer. Floppy disks, in contrast, can be taken in and out of floppy disk drives so you can easily transfer information from one computer to another.

A floppy disk is made of thin, flexible material with a magnetic coating. To protect it and make it easier to handle, the floppy disk itself is enclosed in a rigid plastic case, which gives the floppy disk its “non-floppy” character. Floppy disks are sometimes called diskettes.

10,000 pages

			5,000 pages
	200 pages	300 pages
1 page
4K	800K	1.4 MB	20 MB	40 MB
	Floppy disks		Hard disks

Even the smallest hard disks can hold the equivalent of a few thousand pages of information. High-density floppy disks can hold 1.4 megabytes (MB) of information—about 300 typewritten pages. Double-sided floppy disks can hold 800 kilobytes (K) of information—about 200 typewritten pages. (A megabyte is about 1,000 kilobytes.)

Chapter 4: Working With Disks 75