A lot of people can be forging for thinking their whole computer desktop tower or laptop is the hard drive when referring to it. But the actually hard drive, the device responsible for storing files and operating system such as Windows 10 is actually a little box the size of your hand within the computer or laptop.
Your hard drive shows up in your My Computer usually as a C or D Drive and is measures in either Gigabytes or Terabytes. This article will be referring to HDD’s Hard Disk Drives rather than SSD’s Solid State Drives which are also used for the same thing buy use very different modern technology.
Although Solid State Hard drives are faster and newer, they are also a lot more expensive (the prices are coming down) and most people still have the normal Hard Disk Drives in their computers or laptops.
How Hard Disk Drives Work
The main component of your hard disk drive is a shiny circular plate, which is magnetic and we call this a platter. The platters has billions of independently magnetised sections for storing information in the form of 1’s and 0’s.
Having these sections magnetised ensures that even when the computer is turned of your data and information is retained for the next use, when your computer is booted backed up again.
In order for your computer and hard drive to be able to access this information when it needs it, it creates a map called a format such as NTFS, Fat or GUID and a lot of times when you get a new hard drive or external hard drive it might ask you to choose a format. NTFS is far superior to Fat or Fat32.
Having a map is not only essential for know where you data is on the hard drive, with so many billions of areas to look at, it is also necessary for storing information as well. Without a map, old data you still want would be written over by new information. The Map ensures new data is written to vacant sectors.
Parts of the Hard Drive
Other than the Platters which I have already discussed and with out talking about all the nuts and bolts, there are still four main components to a hard drive which are worth explaining.
The Spindle
Like the name suggests the spindle is the mechanism which spins the platter(s). The faster the platters spin the faster the data can accessed.
Most hard drives (HDD’s) come in either 5400rpm or 7200rpm speeds. Generally the 7200’s are faster but your computers speeds depend on a lot of other things.
Read/Write Arm
A lot like the arm on an old record player accessing the vinyl surface on a record, the read write arm in your hard drive is responsible for reading the data off the drive as it spins around, and writing data to it as well.
The arm ensures the heads are in the correct position depending on the data which needs to be accessed or written and sits about 10 millionths of an inch above the surface of the disk.
The Actuator
The actuator is a very smart and import part of the hard drive. The drives circut board gives instructions to the actuator which via a motor aligns the read/write arm to the exact position it needs to be in to read and write data.
