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Diskette
Diskettes are the simplest form of removable storage that can be read, erased and rewritten as often as desired.
Diskettes have been in existence since the development of the PC - much longer than hard drives which were prohibitively expensive at the time.
Over time, the format and storage capacity of diskettes have changed dramatically:
For a long time, the flexible 5.25" diskette with a capacity of 360 KB was the established standard until the AT brought an expansion to 1.2 MB.
With its original capacity of 720 KB, the tiny 3.5" diskette was a substantial improvement ushered in by IBM. The capacity was soon increased to 1.44 MB as well.
Currently there are numerous alternatives to the conventional diskette: ZIP disks with 100 or 250 MB are the most popular media; however, they are not compatible with the old 3.5" diskettes.
This is not the case with the SuperDisk from Fuji and Sony: It is backward compatible yet offers "only" 120 MB of storage space.
Although they aren't diskettes, CD-ROMs are the number one competitor because they can be recorded to using a CD writer and offer 650 MB of storage.
With networking, however, another service is gaining in importance: Transmitting files is often much less complicated than managing diskettes which are easily susceptible to data errors.
Macintosh computers, with 800 KB and 1.4 MB diskettes, use slightly different formats so that diskettes cannot be exchanged with PCs without the use of special programs.
With diskettes, the read/write head touches the surface of the rotating magnet disc, making them very susceptible to dirt.
To protect against accidental erasure, diskettes have a write protection feature which is activated by covering a notch on 5.25" diskettes or opening a small sliding tab on the housing of 3.5" diskettes.
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