A Quick Guide To Hard Drives


by Peter Paul Simpson - Date: 2010-07-26 - Word Count: 431 Share This!

Every modern PC has a hard disk. The hard drive is a major component of a PC, just like motherboards and graphic cards are. Hard disks were developed in 1956 by IBM for use with an accounting computer. By today's standards, this piece of hardware was very huge and had fifty platters that measured 24 inches in diameter and had a maximum capacity of only a few megabytes. Since then, hard drives have gotten a lot smaller and are able to store an ever increasing amount of information, with a hard disk able to store 4TB (4000 GB) of data planned to be released in 2011.

While they have gotten smaller, faster and more efficient, all hard disks since their invention have functioned on the same principle. The name "hard disk" is used to describe the surface used to store data, which is a hard platter made out of glass or aluminium alloy and coated with magnetic material. This is in contrast to floppy disks, which use a flexible magnetic storage medium. 

Hard disks work by having several platters which spin at very high speeds. Information is read and written magnetically on those platters by a read-and-write head which is placed on an actuator arm that moves the head very quickly as the platters spin. A hard disk also has two electric motors, one that spins the platters and another one that moves the actuator arm. A hard drive also has an electronic board which controls the movements of the head and platters based on data received from the computer. If you want to see what the components of a hard drive look like, you can disassemble an old drive that you no longer use. Note that taking it apart will render the drive useless, as tiny particles contained in the air will damage the read-and-write head and platters.

Today's hard disks can come in a variety of sizes. The most common form factor in use in desktop computers is 3.5". Laptop computers and other electronic devices which require a smaller sized disk use 2.5" and 1.8" form factors. While they are generally associated with computers, many other devices today can use a hard drive to store data. These include video game consoles, photo and video cameras, MP3 players, digital video recorders, etc.

While most hard disks are located inside the device that uses them, external hard drives are also available. These consist of a hard drive that has been put into a special casing which allows it to be used outside of a computer or other device and plugged in via a USB connection.

Related Tags: hard drive, motherboards, external hard drives, graphics cards

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