
Magnetic recording principles and methods
known as a soft error. Hard errors, on the other hand,
are usually permanent and may be caused by physical
contamination of the disk surface. Error checking is usu-
ally performed by a sophisticated checksum method
known as the cyclic redundancy check (CRC).
Operation of the floppy disk controller
Taking the write operation as an example (data being
written from computer memory to disk), the role of the
software is to:
(a) supply the floppy disk controller IC with the start
address (in an area of the computer RAM memory known
as the DMA area) of the data block to be transferred,
(b) supply the correspondin ...