PCs: The Missing Manual

Chapter 9. Hard Drives and Floppy Drives

Many people use magnets to stick little notes onto their refrigerator doors. Your PC also uses magnets to store your information, but with a slightly different approach. Every time you save a file, your PC transforms your data into little magnetic codes, and then spits the magnetic charges onto flat platters that whirl more than 5,000 times every minute. Even more miraculously, your computer’s able to retrieve these codes on demand and turn them back into your words, pictures, and songs.

This chapter—and the two that follow—don’t even try to explain how any of that happens. But these chapters do explain how to find all the drives connected to your PC, keep them running smoothly, clean them up when they get too full, and add new ones when you just plain need more space.

Your PC’s Drives: An Overview

Today’s PCs stuff information onto a wide variety of drives, each designed to store information in different-sized helpings. To see the drives connected to your PC, open My Computer (Start → My Computer). Figure 9-1 shows some samples of almost every kind of drive Windows can communicate with. The list below gives you an overview of the drives you’re likely to find on your computer.

• Floppy drives (storage capacity: 1.44 MB). Standard on most PCs for the past 20 years, floppy drives (Section 9.8) read information from little plastic squares known as floppy disks. Most new PCs no longer include floppy drives, because they’re so rarely used today. But ...