This platter rotates approximately twenty times faster than that of a floppy disk. Therefore, a hard disk is much faster at transferring data to the CPU of the microcomputer. Hard disks, like the one shown above, hold much more data than a floppy disk. A PC floppy disk can hold approximately 1.44 MB of data. Hard disks hold gigabytes of data.
Hard disks are high precision, delicate instruments.
They must be handled with care to avoid head crashes. If this happens, all of the data on the disk will probably be lost. In most cases, the platters in a hard drive are not removable. Therefore, the data on a hard disk cannot usually be carried from one computer to another. Zip cartridges hold 100 MB of data while Jaz cartridges hold 1 GB or 2 GB of data depending on the model.