The Bernoulli cartridge houses a flexible recording disk. This flexibility allows the drive to take advantage of the Bernoulli effect, which gives the drive its enhanced characteristics. Air is passed rapidly over the flexible recording disk. The disk, which normally droops away from the read/write head, is lifted by the reduced pressure above it. This allows the recording disk to come much closer to the head than with a hard disk drive. If a regular hard drive were to be jarred, or experience a loss of power, the head could crash into the recording disk, damaging it. In the Bernoulli drive, however, the flexible disk would merely lose some of its lift and fall away from the head, minimizing the risk of head crashes.
