There are other, newer kinds of disk technologies that are hitting the stores today: ZIP disks, JAZZ disks, and IBM's microdisk. Some of these such as the ZIP and JAZZ disks, are updates to the floppy disk technology to handle the much larger files today. ZIP disks (made by Iomega, Inc.) hold up to 100MB of data while JAZZ store 1GB or 2GB. The prices of these disks are correspondingly much higher than the venerable 3.25 inch floppy: Roughly $15 each for a ZIP disk and $90 each for a JAZZ disk.

This has been only a very cursory overview of a huge subfield input/output and secondary storage. There are many similarities in the devices, and the preference given to one or the other is entirely due to either economics or speed. There are also lots of issues that arise which define the shape and scope of operating system software. Usually, the average programmer doesn't want to have to think about the nitty gritty details of which sectors or which tracks a file actually occupies, so system software must hide all this and provide a convenient abstraction, the file.