When the data is written to the storage media it is for some reason or the other. The main reason for the storage of the data over any storage medium is that of providing the backup. Since the data is backed up then the obvious fact is that will be retrieved some time or the other. The retrieval of the data in the case of any storage device is also an important process.

Consider the organization of the floppy diskette for the example. The organization of the floppy disk is a typical example by which the process in any of the other storage media takes place. The analogy that can be taken for example for the retrieval of the data from any storage media is; consider the text book which has the notes of 20 chapters with each of the chapters having 20 different topics and each of the topic covering as least 2 pages. So now the capacity or the notes that are written in the text book can be equated as the number of chapters multiplied by the number of topics in each chapter multiplied by the pages per topic. That is equivalent to 20 multiplied by the 20 and again the result being multiplied by the 2. So it is equivalent to the 800 pages.

Hence the number of the pages in the text book is equal to the 800 pages. When ever we have to access or retrieve any note in that text book, we will not go through all the pages but we will open the index. Index is the most important page of the book and if that page is torn then it will be very difficult for any user of that to find any topic what so ever it may in that book. The index contains the important information like the chapter numbers, name of the topics described in the chapter and the page number on which that topic is described. This means that to access any note or the data from a large book, it is necessary to have an index that provides references to all the information in that book. It helps to access the notes or the data quickly and much easily.

Now coming to the actual scenario of the floppy disk drive let us consider the floppy disk as the book, they are the both mass storage devices but a text book is read by the humans and the floppy disk is read by a computer system. Hence the format has to be difficult and the writing of the data onto the disk.

The floppy disk is organized as the concentric circles that are called as the tracks. Then this each track is again divided into the sectors, and each of these sectors has a capacity of 512 kilo bytes of the data. When ever the data is accessed from the disk the index table is searched for the data that is to be retrieved. This is the typical case in almost all the types of the storage media.

The retrieval of the data from the database over a network of hundreds of computers is also a tedious task. The retrieval of data from the database retrieves only that specific record and not all the records from the storage media. The File Allocation Table or the FAT is the type of the file system that is usually used for the many storage media. The FAT is the map of the disk space which keeps the track of the sectors that are used, and that are available for the usage and that is unusable or is bad sector. There are usually two copies of the Fat that are stored in the storage media.

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