Chapter 3

Using Disks and Disk Drives

The disk drives in your computer allow you to store data on disk, and retrieve and use stored data when you like. The Equity II can have up to two disk drives. The top disk drive on the Equity II is a floppy disk drive and you can have a hard disk drive or one of two types of floppy disk drives below it. (The introduction in this book describes the available Equity II disk drive configurations.)

This chapter explains how disks work and tells you how to:•Choose diskettes•Care for your disks and disk drives•Protect your data•Use a single floppy disk drive•Use a hard disk drive

How Disks Work

The floppy disks (diskettes) you insert in your system’s floppy disk drives are round pieces of flexible plastic coated with magnetic material and enclosed in protective jackets. Like a record, a diskette has circular tracks on both sides. The computer stores data you enter as magnetic patterns on these circular tracks.

A small read/write head in the disk drive interprets the magnetic patterns. When a diskette is in a drive, the read/write head is right over the large oval hole in the diskette jacket. This hole allows the read/write head to access the diskette when you store, retrieve, and delete data.

Unlike a floppy disk, a hard disk is rigid and fixed in place. It is sealed in a protective environment free of dust and dirt, so you cannot see it. A hard disk stores data the same way as a floppy disk, only it works faster and has a much larger storage capacity.

Because data is stored magnetically, you can retrieve it, record over it, and erase it-just as you play, record, and erase music on cassette tapes.

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