Testing Floppy/Hard Disks

Magneto-optics provides a means for testing magnetically stored information on data carriers (HDD & floppy disks) and visualizing it in real time .

A floppy disk consists of a plastic-bonded permanent magnetic disk protected by a sleeve. Targeted local magnetization of the disk allows data to be stored on it. Magnetization errors or external interference can damage the magnetic information or make it unreadable for disk drives. This results in data carriers that are virtually unreadable. Our magneto-optical sensor systems, such as cmos-magview, make it possible to locate, visualize and analyze errors of this type using our image processing software.

In addition to conventional floppy disks, you can also magneto-optically test Iomega Zip disks, Olympus MO disks, and Sanyo ID photo disks. Hard disk drives, often referred to as HDDs, are similar to floppy disks in that they have rotating, magnetizable disks inside. Errors can also occur when writing magnetic data, for example, due to defective read/write heads. Our magneto-optical sensors, in combination with a polarization microscope, can be used to visualize and forensically analyze the magnetic field structures of HDDs up to 250 MB in size, potentially recovering lost data.