How Many Floppy Disks Does it Take to Equal 1 Gigabyte?
When it comes to modern storage, the average person doesn’t really think about how much it has changed over the years. However, if you go back to the 1980s and 1990s, you’ll realize just how different things were before flash drives and even CDs came around. Before those media became popular, storing information on your computer was done using floppy disks, and if you were really advanced, you could even use Zip disks as well! Nowadays we don’t think about such things as kilobytes or megabytes, but we once did in the not too distant past!
Floppy Disks
The answer is that there are actually 1,073,741 floppy disks that would take the place of a single gigabyte. This is because you would need about 35 floppy disks for every megabyte.
Giga Byte
The first thing you need to know is that a gigabyte is equal to about 1,000,000 kilobytes. This means that for one gig of data there would be one million individual bytes of data. To transfer this much data from disk you would need some sort of disk drive capable of reading and writing on the floppy disks. The next thing you should know is that a typical floppy disk can hold around 100 kilobytes of data.
This means that 10,000 floppy disks would be needed in order to have enough space for the transfer if all the disks had the same amount of information on them. If not all disks are going to have the same amount of information, then more will be needed depending on what type and how much information each has.
Floppy Disks into Giga Byte
Depending on what your question is really asking, there are different metrics for you to use. It would take 2560 bytes of storage on a 3.5 inch floppy diskette or roughly 1000 bytes on a 5.25 inch floppy diskette, which makes them roughly equal in storage capacity. On the other hand, with today’s technology, they would take up nearly two petabytes of storage space: that’s close to 1000000000 gigabytes (100000000000000000).
How many floppy disks are there in Gigabyte
If we take a look at the math, there are 8.38865 gigabytes in a floppy disk, which means it would take 125 floppy disks to equal 1 GB of storage space. It may not seem like much now, but when we compare the first computer that used magnetic hard drives only had 10 MB of space.
In 1952 IBM introduced magnetic hard drive technology which they first made commercially available in 1956. IBM reached 100 MB of storage capacity by 1964 which is still impressive today with up-to-date flash memory holding multiple terabytes of data. However, if we continue the trend and examine what the projected disk size will be by 2045, we are looking at an astounding 7 quadrillion gigabytes for just one small magnetic disk!
Floppy Disks VS gigabyte
It’s not just a straight conversion of gigabytes and floppy disks; many factors go into the equation. For example, each floppy disk is formatted with 3600 byte sectors, which translates to (1.44MB/3600) or 2288 sectors per disk. That means if you were writing a very large file that was exactly 5 GB in size, you would need 18 disks to record the data on (1.44 MB * 2288). However, if you are formatting your disks for an old computer that can only use 720KB floppies, then all you need is one disk! The same goes for VHS tapes vs DVDs; but both of these video formats cannot hold as much data as an iPod Classic can on one CD-ROM disc.
