why there are CD reader speeding at 58x, but it was almost impossible to easily find a 2x floppy disk (I may remember there were some of them commercially available), despite the fact they were on the market for a much longer period?
2007-03-17 11:59:13 · 6 answers · asked by perlo 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
CD support was not designed to support highest spinning velocity. However, they can reach 58 (or more) the original speed. I can't believe that a FD was unable to support a speed 2x or 4x. All the answers received seems to me "post-hoc"...
2007-03-19 12:42:59 · update #1
Floppies had a soft disc inside so you couldn't spin them too fast or you would risk the data not being read. If it had a solid disc it would have been faster but no longer called a floppy, hence Zip drives.
2007-03-17 12:09:22 · answer #1 · answered by cartfan300 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
A lot of it ultimately boils down to the material.
CD's are made of polycarbonate, same stuff as water bottles, and they combine strength with dimensional stability. Compare that with the soft plastic of a floppy disc. The soft plastic of a floppy is pliable enough that tiny ripples and warps in the material that it limits how small you can lay down a dense pattern of tiny magnetic domains.
The electronics were probably slow enough in the days of floppies that they were probably the limiting factor and so the performance of the demands on the material were probably pretty low.
By comparison, CD's can support much smaller features, and so a more dimensionally stable material is required to be able to hold a dense pattern of bits stably enough so that they can be spun at high speed and still be read.
2007-03-17 19:12:23 · answer #2 · answered by Pfistulated Cow 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I think it was never upgraded because for the amount of data it could store, the speed was sufficient at the time. To upgrade the speed would've also meant to upgrade storage capacity, and with a single CD holding around 650 megs of data, even if they had upgraded the floppy to hold 64 times what it held back when, it would've still only come to 90-odd megs or so, and it just wasn't worth it.
2007-03-17 19:09:58 · answer #3 · answered by netthiefx 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
im sure the soft material that the floppy was made out of would not withstand the kind of rpms required for that kind of speed
2007-03-17 19:03:22 · answer #4 · answered by Catman 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
There were 3 1/2" 720K, 1.44MB, and 2.88MB, 5 1/2" 160k SDdD, 320K DSDD, 1.2M. 8" 120K SSSD.
2007-03-17 19:13:43 · answer #5 · answered by ? 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
you're talking dinosaurs here, my pc hasn't even got an 'a'drive
2007-03-17 19:03:29 · answer #6 · answered by defragmentedbrain 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋