1. Removable Media

2. Floppy Disk Drives Almost a dead deal

3. The Basics Media/plastic/media Spins at 360 rpm Read/Write heads contact the disk surface – so don’t pull a floppy while the activity light is on

4. Formatting Electronic map for storing data/files on the disk Concentric circles – tracks Slice up tracks to get sectors; each sector holds 512 Bytes of data Sets up four areas: boot record, File Allocation Table (FAT), Root Directory and Data Area Formatting is different for different devices (PCs, Macs, Sewing Machines, …)

5. Mac and PC disks Mac drives have two motors: spindle and eject/insert Spindle motor is variable speed on Macs Macs can read and write PC disks PCs can’t read or write Mac disks

6. Types of Disks You can still find Double-sided, Double density (760 Bytes) disks – DD for short Most are Double-sided, High density – HD at 1.44 MB So much hassle over formatting that they come already formatted now

7. Installing Floppy Drives A: or B: - reserved by Windows for floppy drives Connect with 34-pin ribbon cable

8. Installing, cont. Red stripe is Pin 1 Get the connector backwards, drive light will stay on, but drive won’t work. No harm to system. Be careful with power connector – get that upside down and you cook the drive

9. CMOS Should automatically detect drive Swap Floppy Device setting allows A to B swap – only if you have two drives Boot Up Floppy Seek – disable to save two seconds during POST

10. Boot Sequence Where will I find an OS? I set CD first, then floppy then hard disk drive Often have to poke around in CMOS to find where you set this

11. Maintenance I keep a floppy drive cleaner disk Too much use, or too little use and drive heads will need cleaning Don’t poke around with a Q-Tip

12. Troubleshooting Drive won’t read floppy disk Take disk to another computer Try another floppy disk (known good) Clean the read/write heads Replace the drive

13. USB floppy drives Popular for laptops Can’t boot from them – need USB drivers to load first

14. Flash Memory Drives Thumb drive, Jump Drive, Flash drive Gaining in popularity daily Have replaced Zip/floppy drives Is 32GB still the upper limit? No?

15. CompactFlash (CF) Oldest, most complex and physically largest of memory cards. Can also get a microdrive in CF II form factor About extinct now

16. SmartMedia After CF Used in digital cameras for a while Almost extinct now

17. Secure Digital (SD) Newest on the block Most common format used today SD and SDIO formats – not interchangeable Mini and Micro show up in cellular phones

18. Card Readers Can be external to PC or mounted internally (in 3.5” bay) 5 to 7 to 9 slots for different media types

19. CD,DVD and Blu-Ray Media Optical Drives

20. Definitions CD-ROM – Compact Disk, Read Only Media/Memory; this is how programs come to you DVD – Digital Versatile/Video Disk

21. How it lays out This time the data is INSIDE the disk: Data Location Label, or not Laser 10

22. ISO 9660 Also called: High Sierra for the hotel in Colorado where standard got developed Joliet – Microsoft’s extension(s); Mac and Linux support these also. Rock Ridge – UNIX file system support El Torito – Bootable CD media Apple Extensions – Apple’s HFS file system

23. CD Speed 1x : Original (and still) audio standard: 150,000Bps or 150KBps 4x : 600KBps 24x : The “magic line” – Below this drives and connections were proprietary – and often to sound card – These drives were single speed – always on At and above 24x – Variable speed – spin up, read, spin down – Uniform connection method (ATAPI-6)

24. To Burn a CD Second, more powerful laser (10x read) Two CD-R formats: 72-minute (650 MB) and 80-minute (700 MB) Burns organic dye to create pits (0’s) Need burning software below XP CD-R is write once, read many CD-RW is write often, read often (can be erased) Speeds are ; 16x10x40x for mine

25. UDF Universal Data Format, replacement for 9660 Vista supports this but not XP Supports packet writing Roxio’s DirectCD and Nero’s InCD allow disk to feel like a hard/floppy disk

26. DVD Big step up in capacity: 4.37 GB Smaller pits, more dense than CD Single-sided or double-sided Single layer or double layer You need decoder (MPEG-2) to watch movies on your PC – most DVD drives ship with them DVD+R, -R, +RW and –RW

27. Blu-Ray Uses blue laser (405 nm) vs. red (650 nm) Capacity of 25 GB and multiples Still on the pricy side of things ($50+)

28. ISO files A complete copy of the contents of an optical disk Win 7 will “burn an ISO” i.e. make a disk from the ISO file (not copy the iso to disk) Need software for XP and Vista – find free on the Internet

29. Region Codes Attempt to limit distribution/bootlegging Can only change four times then stuck Region 0: all regions Region 1: US and Canada Region 8: Cruise ships and airlines

30. Installation Master or Slave Ribbon (data) cable Power You can still find SCSI drives Most optical drives are SATA today

31. Buffer Underrun Fortunately, it is a thing of the past (16x burn rate and slower drives) No, you don’t see a spec on the buffer size on the drive’s box BURN-Proof seems to be the maiden name for underrun protection

32. Troubleshooting I have had zero luck with trying to clean an optical drive to get it functioning again Sometimes it’s a compatibility issue… but rare today Replace the drive, they are not that expensive