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10 February 2020

Advantages and disadvantages of magnetic disk

As we know that the magnetic disk is the most popular direct access secondary device. They are also the most popular online secondary storage of the device. The magnetic disk comes in various sizes. They can be portable or permanently mounted in their storage devices or disk drives. Here now this post gives the information about the advantages and disadvantages of a magnetic disk to better understand this topic. 

Advantages of a magnetic disk:

  • Data records can be stored for both sequential and direct access.
  • This disk was the high speed of access and update as no sorting of transactions.
  • They follow direct access mode for reading or the writing data onto some data files.
  • The data transfer time rate for the magnetic disk system is normally higher than a tape system.
  • The magnetic disk is suitable for both online and offline storage of data.
  • Online disk records of several related files can be updated simultaneously by using only a single input transaction.
  • Floppy disk and zip disks both are being compact in size and light in weight are easy to handle and store.
  • The magnetic disk is less valuable to data corruption due to careless handling.
  • Due to random access property, a magnetic disk is often used by multiple users as a shared device.
  • Floppy disk and another is to be zip disk is also easily portable from one place to another. They are used for the transfer of data.
  • Any information desired from this disk storage can be accused in a few milliseconds because it is a direct access storage device.
  • The storage capacity is unlimited as many numbers of disk required can be added.
  • Due to low cost and high recording densities cost per magnetic disk are too much less or minimum. 
  • Less prone to corruption of data.

Disadvantages of a magnetic disk:

  • Expensive than magnetic tapes.
  • It must be stored in a dust-free environment in order to protect them from crashing down.
  • This disk was more susceptible to breach of security and access gain to sensitive online disk files from remote terminals.
  • Difficult to maintain the security of information.
  • Not ideal for devices that require access required is of sequential nature than direct or random nature.
  • A disk drive or disk failure results in loss of entire data stored on it.
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