Hard Drive
ALL ABOUT THE HARD DRIVE OF A COMPUTER SYSTEM
WHAT IS A HARD DRIVE?
HARD DRIVE:
The hard drive was first introduced on September 13, 1965 and consists of one or more hard drive platters inside of an air sealed casing. Most computer hard drives are in an internal drive bay at the front of the computer and connect to the motherboard using either an ATA, SCSI, or SATA cable and power cable. Below is a picture of what the inside of a hard drive looks like for a desktop and laptop hard drive.
PHOTO EXPLANATION
HOW IS DATA READ AND STORED ON A HARD DRIVE?
Data sent to and from the hard drive is interpreted by the disk controller, which tells the hard drive what to do and how to move the components within the drive. When the operating system needs to read or write information, it examines the hard drive's File Allocation Table (FAT) to determine file location and available areas. Once this has been determined, the disk controller instructs the actuator to move the read/write arm and align the read/write head. Because files are often scattered throughout the platter, the head needs to move to different locations to access all information.
All information stored on a traditional hard drive, like the above example, is done magnetically. After completing the above steps, if the computer needs to read information from the hard drive, it would read the magnetic polarities on the platter. One side of the magnetic polarity is 0 and the other is 1. Reading this as binary data, the computer can understand what the data is on the platter. For the computer to write information to the platter, the read/write head aligns the magnetic polarities, writing 0's and 1's that can be read later.