Floppy Disk Drive
- The FDD installs in one of the external drive bays at the front of the PC case and is secured by machine screws. External means you can access the drive from the outside.
- It is powered by a cable with a 4-pin connector that comes from the power supply.
- It transfers data to and from the motherboard by means of a 34 pin ribbon cable.
- It stores data magnetically on a removable floppy disk. A pickup arm in the drive floats above the disk surface. The arm moves rapidly back and forth across the disk surface as a small magnetic sensor at the end of the arm reads and writes data on the rotating disk surface.
- Floppy disks hold 1.44 Mbytes, which at one time was a large amount of data. Today many programs and files are much larger than this. In spite of being surpassed in size by CD and DVD, floppy drives are still found on many newer PCs.
