How Does a PC Hard Drive Works?

It is common to see in all the computer purchase guides and promotions something like: HDD 200GB. This means the computer has 200 gigabytes of memory in its hard drive. The hard drive is the part of the computer that stores all your information when the computer is turned off. This includes all your music, videos, programs, and even the Operative System you have installed.

Physically, the hard drive is a disk made of metal and coated with a magnetic material on both sides, usually an iron oxide compound. All this magnetic particles can be magnetically oriented at two positions representing the 0's and 1's in the binary code, and binary code is the computer's language. The disk is enclosed in a mechanical device that spins it at different speeds depending on the hard drive your computer is equipped with. Some spin at 5600 rpm, others at 7200 rpm and some at speeds of over 10000 rpm. As the disk spin rate increases, its ability to retrieve data is faster. The device also has heads for writing and reading and they are suspended at the end of two arms that move from the edge to the center of the disk retrieving and writing data.

The way data is stored n the disk might seem confusing, but in reality it's pretty simple. Data is arranged in concentric tracks like the old disks did with songs. The disk is further divided into other sections arranged like slices on a pizza. The first time the hard drive is going to be used, you need to format it so it can be divided correctly and data can be stored.

Modern hard drives come with a built in system called IDE, which stands for Integrated Drive Electronics. This system takes care of the data arrangement on the disk. Old hard drives didn't have this built in function, so the computer was left with the task of deciding where to store the data on the disk, decreasing the computer's performance.

Another thing that has been increasing at a tremendous pace with the years is the storage capacity of the hard drive. I remember when I was a kid back in the late 90's and my dad bought a computer at Sam's club. It was a top-notch computer back then and its price was quite high, over $2000 USD; it came equipped with a hard drive having the amazing storage capacity of 1.2 GB when most computers had around 700MB. It seems unbelievable that a little over a decade ago hard drives had the capacity of a CD, 1/5 of the capacity of a DVD or less than 1/20 of the storage a blue ray disk has.

A hard drive may look just like another component of a computer, but it's a crucial element and its technology is being improved every year.