Hard Drive - A hard drive is a fast, high capacity internal disk drive found in all modern PCs. Unless the computer is older than say, 12 years, it should have a hard drive in it. Any PC running Windows does.

The reason for having a hard drive is to give you a permanent place to keep your computer's information. They are generally much more reliable than keeping your data on a floppy disk (that's not to say you shouldn't back up your info though), are much faster, and hold tons more.

Adding a second hard drive is a great way to add more space for files. They are available as both internal or external.

Floppy Drive - These little 3.5" disks hold about 1.4 MB of information. It seems like just yesterday that floppy disks ruled the planet, but now with the cheap price of CD-Rs and CD-R drives, the floppy drive is being put to pasture. Most new computers don't even have one.

Regarding drives -

As John has mentioned in his post, floppy drives are becoming obsolete. When you buy a new computer, you may even have to pay extra to have a floppy drive installed.

Rather than continue using floppies, copy your files to the My Documents folder from your floppies and then burn a CD of the entire My Documents folder as a backup. If you don't have a CD burner, you can purchase one for around $20.

Floppies disintegrate over time, and data stored on floppies may eventually be unreadable, so change the way you store things now. Data stored on CD's will last much longer, but you also have another option.

Newer digital storage devices, such as flash drives - also known as thumb drives, keychain drives, pen drives, and the like - store much more than floppies, and they are highly portable. A 64 MB flash drive holds the equivalent of 44 floppies, and a 128 MB drive holds the equivalent of 88 floppies. Both are the size of a 5-stick pack of gum. The cost of a flash drive depends on the capacity, but the smaller drives (64-128 MB) can be purchased for under $30. I carry three flash drives in my purse - much more convenient than the 220 floppies they replace! The advantage of using a flash drive is that you can update information on the fly. With CD's, you'll need to re-burn the files.

Flash drives plug into a USB port on a computer, and, if you are using XP, the drive will be instantly recognized. Windows 98 can recognize flash drives, too, but you'll have to install some software to make that happen.

My suggestions...make regular backups of your data and transfer data from floppies to other storage media. Store backups of important data in safety deposit box, not at your home.

Stay informed about your storage options, and you are less likely to lose data.