TEXT B. FLOPPY AND WINCHESTER DISKS

Floppy disks are a magnetic storage medium (среда) which can be recorded, erased and used over and over again. Floppy disks are flexible (гибкий) plastic disks which have several standard sizes. Full size floppy disks are 8 inches in diameter; minifloppy disks are 5 inches in diameter. Both full size floppy disks and minifloppy disks are housed in a paper-like plastic envelope, usually black, and remain (оставаться) in the envelope at all times.

Microfloppy disks are in size from 3 to 4 inches. They are housed in a rigid (жесткий) plastic shell (оболочка) of different design. The number of bytes that can be recorded on a floppy disk are about 80,000 to 1,000,000 and more. Floppy disks are used extensively in personal computers, small business computers, word processing, etc.

Winchester disks are, in fact, hard disks made of metal. The name arises from the place of original development - the branch (филиал) of the IBM in the city of Winchester (Great Britain).

The Winchester technique requires that the access arm (рычаг выборки), read/write heads and disks are constructed as a sealed unit (герметичный модуль). By aligning the read/write heads to their own set of disks, greater storage and accessing speeds are obtainable. The Winchester disk provides a very large record density in comparison with other devices. It may be used in all kinds of computers.