- PC HARDWARE -

Hard drive animation

HARD DRIVE BASICS:

What you are observing above is the internal working of the most common secondary storage device in a PC (or Mac), the HARD DRIVE.  The hard drive, in my opinion, is the most important device in a PC because it contains ALL of your programs and personal files.  Also, your hard drive has a great deal to do with your overall system performance and speed.  Today's hard drives rotate at speeds of 5,400 RPM or 7,200 RPM and the overall system performance differential between one and the other is about 30% (but you need a UD100 motherboard to make the 7,200 RPM drive to work at full speed).  The main components in a hard drive are a magnetic storage disk and a pickup (read arm and sensor) device, and the micro-electronics that make it work - and operation of the hard drive itself is much like the earlier hi-fi turntable or current CD ROM  where the `read' apparatus extracts information from the disk and transfers it into the system.

This is a cutaway (under the cover) view of a typical hard drive.

When you first turn your computer on, your CPU, CMOS, and RAM come alive to check all installed components - and then your hard drive kicks in to start transferring program information into real memory. From there on, your input devices (keyboard and mouse) activate further information transfer between your hard drive and RAM and manifests the transfer via your primary output device, your monitor.  

What all this means, simply, is that your hard drive is right in the middle of all system activity - and the faster things read-and-write to-and-from your hard drive, the faster your computer works!

A `big' hard drive in 1987 could hold 10 MB of information.  Today's hard drives can store 50 GB plus of data.  For you number crunchers, `MB' means "megabyte (millions of bytes)" and GB means "gigabyte" (thousands of megabytes).  A `byte' is 8 characters (a 1 or 0 - lowest form of computer information) of data (one byte represents an `a' or a `z' - etc.).  My brain can't quite comprehend this much `stuff' being stored and shuffled around in a PC so fast - but it really happens!

Now we will talk about configuring new and replacement hard drives, both internal and external, and both IDE and SATA.