magnetic media

Shrykull · Post by **Shrykull** » 2003-08-30 08:03pm

I have a book which talks about magnetic media (not sure which they mean, either hard drives or floppies or both) in which it talks about tiny metal filings being scattered on the surface, and they are arranged by magnets, what if the filings fell off, or some of them did?

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-08-30 08:35pm

Ai yi yi.

Modern magnetic media is made by applying a special magnetic substrate to the surface of the media in question. Floppy disks and tapes are somewhat different, as they are made out of a special plastic with the magnetic material embedded in it.

This magnetic material can be thought of as ferrous metal filings, but that's rather inaccurate. In reality, the read/write heads merely change the polarity of the metal they are over; one polarity is a 0, and the other is a 1. There's no physical movement of the magnetic material.