Borrowed from the music recording industry, tape a great leap forward. In 1971, IBM introduced the considerably smaller, flexible magnetic disk, the now commonplace floppy. Since their debuts, both hard and floppy disks have shrunk steadily in size and just as steadily grown in capacity. The smallest floppy disk, at 3.5 inches, can hold as much as 1.44 megabytes of data, while a hard disk of the same size can store several times that amount of information. The diskette drive is one of the most essential components of a computer.
Computers have several drives, each with a different construction and purpose.
The best thing about diskettes is that they can be used over and over again. Information can be written to them and then deleted to make room for other data. On 5.25 diskettes, this device is a notch on the side of the diskette, the notch must be covered with a label. Normally new diskettes are packaged with a sheet of labels. When the square is exposed the, the diskette is write-protected, and no new data can be written to the diskette.