HARD DISK DRIVE. - What is it?

2011-09-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

Hard drives are one of the fundamental parts in a computer.It is the ware house or storage in which electronic gagdets like computers,camcoders,ipods,ipads among others store their program files, data and other computer/user relevant information.A hard drive is similar to your DVD's and CD's plates and stores information on a thin magnetic layer like the shiny surface of cassette tapes and video tapes. A hard drive, also known as a hard disk drive or HDD, s made of digital magnetic disk arranged with a little gap between each other in a cylindrical form. These disk is written on and read by a heads that floats on a firm of air directly above each of the platters.

The Cyclar disc a hard disk drive are usually made of glass or aluminum and polished with magnetic material on both surface thereby making the platter appear shiny, like a mirror.This is because a very clean and polished surface is very critical to the proper functioning of the hard drive because even the smallest spec of dust can cause irreparable damage.

The hard disk drive has several platters inside of it, which is stacked one on top of the other plates in the cupboard. There is a small gap between each platter, which allows each platter’s head to pass over it. The heads are all on the same arm, which has a separate branch for each head, rather like the tines of a fork turned on its side.

When you turn your computer on, the platters immediately begin to spin. The platters in a desktop computer hard disk drive typically get up to about 7,200 rotations per minute (rpm), while the hard drives in laptop computers usually run at 5,400 rpm. You may be able to hear the steady hum of your hard drive when the fan is not running.

When your computer is on but you are not retrieving or writing anything to the memory, the platters in the hard disk drive are always spinning. The arm with the heads on it, however, only begins to move when you run a program or open, save, or delete a file. This arm can move back and forth across the surface of the platter as many as 50 times in a single second, causing it to appear as a blur if you ever have the opportunity to watch. Because everything in the hard disk drive moves so quickly, the head never actually touches the platters, instead skimming just barely above them, supported by a cushion of moving air that is generated by the platters’ spinning.

ORGINS OF HARD DRIVES.

The computer Hard Drives was introduced by IBM in 1956 in the United States.Hard disk drives have highly decreased in cost and its storage memory has exponetially increased over the years. Hard disk drives have been the dominant device for secondary storage of data in general purpose computers since the early 1960s.They have maintained this position because advances in their recording density have kept pace with the requirements for secondary storage. Today's HDDs operate on high-speed serial interfaces; i.e., serial ATA (SATA) or serial attached SCSI (SAS).

For further reading about the advancement of hard drives click here to visit the wikipedia.

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HARD DISK DRIVE. - What is it?