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Drives

Floppy Disk Drive

A soft, magnetic disk is called floppy because it flops if you wave it (at least, the 5¼-inch variety does). Unlike most hard disks, floppy disks (often called floppies or diskettes) are portable, because it can be removed from the disk drive. Disk drives for floppy disks are called floppy drives.

A floppy disk is made from a thin piece of plastic coated with a magnetic material on both sides. The tracks are arranged in concentric rings so that the software can jump from "file 1" to "file 19". The diskette spins like a record and the heads move to the correct track, providing what is known as direct access storage.

CD Drive

General

A CD is a fairly simple piece of plastic. Most of a CD consists of an injection-molded piece of clear polycarbonate plastic. The CD Drive has the job of finding and reading the data stored as bumps on the CD. Considering how small the bumps are, the CD Drive is an exceptionally precise piece of equipment. The drive consists of three fundamental components:

  1. A drive motor spins the disc. This drive motor is precisely controlled to rotate between 200 and 500 rpm depending on which track is being read.
  2. A laser and a lens system focus in on and read the bumps.
  3. A tracking mechanism moves the laser assembly so that the laser's beam can follow the spiral track. The tracking system has to be able to move the laser at micron resolutions.

The fundamental job of the CD Drive is to focus the laser on the track of bumps.

General Problems

The types of problems found in a CD drive can be classified into several categories:

  1. Mechanical problems such as dirt, lack of lubrication, wear, worn-out rubber parts, dirty switches or physical damage can all cause failure with CD-ROMS.
  2. Electrical Adjustments; coarse tracking, fine tracking, focus, laser power.
  3. Power problems such as lack of 12volt or 5 volt input, or failure of the power supply can be repaied.
  4. Bad connections such as broken solder on the pins of components that are stressed like limit or interlock switches, or audio or power jacks, internal connectors that need to be cleaned and reseated, broken traces on flexible cables, or circuit board damage due to a fall all can cause failures of CD-ROMS.
  5. Electrical Component Failure such as a power surge or a lightning strike may damage compoents in the power supply.

Motherboard | Drives | Hard Disk | Keyboard | Mouse | NIC | BIOS | Network | Monitor
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