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X10 Accelerated Floppy Drive
The X-10 Fastcache Floppy Drive was a 1996 floppy disk drive that read 3.5-inch floppies at ten times the speed of a standard floppy drive. Invention The drive was invented by Martin Bodo, Bob Rosenbloom, Ken Wong, Alan Lorenz and Igor Lokhmotov. Bodo said that "Slow floppies always bugged me. I saw that all the parts of a PC were getting exponentially faster, but not the floppy disk. That was the inspiration for the X-10 project." It could read an entire floppy disk in about five seconds. The X-10 drive ran at 4x spindle speed and could write or read to both sides of the floppy simultaneously. Whenever the user inserted a disk, the drive would immediately read the entire floppy into its own custom Intel 80188 CPU-based proprietary controller card RAM. The drive used motorized ejection so it could sequence and cache writes. The drive was optimized so it could step fast enough to avoid missing tracks improving over the normal slow seek time Higher performance in hard disk dr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floppy Disk Drive
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three most popular (and commercially available) floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM in 1971, had a disk diameter of . Subsequently, the 5¼-inch (133.35 mm) and then the 3½-inch (88.9 mm) became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and Floppy disk variants, other-size fl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intel 80188
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components such as central processing units (CPUs) and related products for business and consumer markets. It is one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue, and ranked in the ''Fortune'' 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years, until it was removed from the ranking in 2018. In 2020, it was reinstated and ranked 45th, being the 7th-largest technology company in the ranking. It was one of the first companies listed on Nasdaq. Intel supplies microprocessors for most manufacturers of computer systems, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). It also manufactures chipsets, network interface controllers, flash mem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floppy-disk Controller
A floppy-disk controller (FDC) is a hardware component that directs and controls reading from and writing to a computer's floppy disk drive (FDD). It has evolved from a discrete set of components on one or more circuit boards to a special-purpose integrated circuit (IC or "chip") or a component thereof. An FDC is responsible for reading data presented from the host computer and converting it to the drive's on-disk format using one of a number of encoding schemes, like FM encoding (single density) or MFM encoding (double density), and reading those formats and returning it to its original binary values. Depending on the platform, data transfers between the controller and host computer would be controlled by the computer's own microprocessor, or an inexpensive dedicated microprocessor like the MOS 6507 or Zilog Z80. Early controllers required additional circuitry to perform specific tasks like providing clock signals and setting various options. Later designs included more of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disk Buffer
In computer storage, a disk buffer (often ambiguously called a disk cache or a cache buffer) is the embedded memory in a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) acting as a buffer (computer science), buffer between the rest of the computer and the physical hard disk platter or flash memory that is used for storage. Modern hard disk drives come with 8 to 256 Mebibyte, MiB of such memory, and solid-state drives come with up to 4 GB of cache memory. Since the late 1980s, nearly all disks sold have embedded microcontrollers and either an Advanced Technology Attachment, ATA, Serial ATA, SCSI, or Fibre Channel interface. The drive circuitry usually has a small amount of memory, used to store the data going to and coming from the disk platters. The disk buffer is physically distinct from and is used differently from the page cache typically kept by the operating system in the computer's main memory. The disk buffer is controlled by the microcontroller in the hard d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seek Time
Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics. These performance characteristics can be grouped into two categories: #Access time, access time and #Data transfer rate, data transfer time (or rate). Access time The ''access time'' or ''response time'' of a rotating drive is a measure of the time it takes before the drive can actually Data transmission, transfer data. The factors that control this time on a rotating drive are mostly related to the mechanical nature of the rotating disks and moving Disk read-and-write head, heads. It is composed of a few independently measurable elements that are added together to get a single value when evaluating the performance of a storage device. The access time can vary significantly, so it is typically provided by manufacturers or measured in benchmarks as an average. The key components that are typically added together to obtain the access time are: * #Seek time, Seek time * #Rotati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floppy Disk Drives
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three most popular (and commercially available) floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM in 1971, had a disk diameter of . Subsequently, the 5¼-inch (133.35 mm) and then the 3½-inch (88.9 mm) became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
