Other Components of a Computer

OUTPUT DEVICES:-

• Output devices make the information resulting from the processing available for use.
• The two output devices more commonly used are the printer and the computer screen.
• The printer produces a hard copy of your output, and the computer

Storage Devices:-
Auxiliary storage devices are used to store data when they are not being used in memory.The most common types of auxiliary storage used on personal computers are floppy disks, hard disks and CD-ROM drives.

Floppy Disks:-

• A floppy disk is a portable , inexpensive storage medium that consists of a thin, circular, flexible plastic disk with a magnetic coating enclosed in a square-shaped plastic shell.

Structure of Floppy Disks:-

Initially Floppy disks were 8-inches wide, they then shrank to 5.25 inches, and today the most widely used folly disks are 3.5 inches wide and can typically store 1.44 megabytes of data.

A floppy disk is a magnetic disk, which means that it used magnetic patterns to store data.

Data in floppy disks can be read from and written to.

Formatting is the process of preparing a disk for reading and writing.

A track is a narrow recording band that forms a full circle on the surface of the disk.

The disk’s storage locations are divided into pie-shaped sections called sectors.A sectors is capable of holding 512 bytes of data.

A typical floppy stores data on both sides and has 80 tracks on each side with 18 sectors per track.
HARD DISK:-

Another form of auxiliary storage is a hard disk.

A hard disk consists of one or more rigid metal plates coated with a metal oxide material that allows data to be magnetically recorded on the surface of the platters.

The hard disk platters spin at a high rate of speed, typically 5400 to 7200 revolutions per minute (RPM).

Storage capabilities of hard disks for personal computers range from 10 GB to 120 GB (one billion bytes are called a gigabyte).

COMPACT DISCS:-

• A compact disk (CD), also called an optical disc, is a flat round, portable storage medium that is usually 4.75 inch in diameter.
• A CD-ROM (read only memory), is a compact disc that used the same laser technology as audio CDs for recording music.
• In addition it can contain other types of data such as text, graphics, and video.
• The capacity of a CD-ROM is 650 MB of data.