| Part Four - What's inside the box? - Hard Drives |
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| Work - Computer Primer | |
| Written by mbrock | |
| Wednesday, 21 May 2008 20:59 | |
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The hard drive, or hard disk drive (HDD), is the device inside your computer that allows you to permanently store data. The hard drive is a mechanical device that has rotating platters inside of a sealed case. Digitally encoded data is stored on and retrieved from the magnetic surfaces of these platters via a moving actuator arm with read-and-write heads on it. Since the data is stored magnetically, you should never allow magnets near a hard drive. Or else your data may become corrupt. Since a hard drive is a mechanical device, something will eventually go wrong with it and it will die. Because of this, you should always keep backups of important data in a safe place There are several different types of hard drives for PC's including IDE, SCSI, SATA, and SAS. These acronyms stand for the different types of hard drive interfaces that a computer may have. SATA drives have recently replaced IDE as the most common type of hard drives. SAS is a new generation of hard drives. Your computer can only use the type of hard drive it's motherboard was designed for - unless there is a special card in your computer to allow for another type of drive.You may have more than one hard drive in your computer or you may have one drive that is partitioned into sections so that your operating system sees it as multiple drives. Most PC's will have one or two physical hard drive units. On some computer systems several hard drives can be connected together as a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives, or a RAID. RAIDs can be beneficial in that they can improve performance and they can be used for backups - but sadly RAIDS are beyond the scope of this article. There are different sizes of hard drives depending on what type of computer you have. Laptop hard drives are physically smaller than desktop drives. Hard drive sizes are usually given in Gigabytes and they are now approaching the Terabyte (1000 GB) level. Some common manufacturers of hard drives are: Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, and Hitachi. As mentioned above, over time all hard drives will die. They are mechanical devices with moving parts so wearing out is in their nature. It is important that you keep backups of important data on other media such as CD's, DVD's, or other drives. If you have a hard drive that dies, there are services that charge a hefty price that will painstakingly try to get your data back. Hard drives are not difficult to install. But they do require work and special software if need to have your whole operating system and all of your data transfered.
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