Hard disk drives are comparable in appearance to the disc jockey's turntables. As a computer hard drive, there is a reading head and a turning platter containing the data to be read.
Inside Hard Drive
They usually are Attached to the ATA bus or SATA bus on the motherboard unless it is an external device. Hard drives serve as data storage holding the operating system, softwares and any other data you may put in.
The data are read by the RAM memory then managed by the hardware accessing these data like the CPU.
In few words, hard drives can be seen as a gigantic file cabinet reached by the rest of your computer hardware.
For those who are seeking more advanced information you will find links throughout the content and at the bottom page as how to install hard drives.
ATA Hard Drive And SATA Hard Drive Interfaces
The Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), also known by the IDE abbreviation, is a standard interface for hard drives and optic drives (CD and DVD drives). The IDE has a low supported capacity. Hard drives with more than 500 MB could not be used with this interface. When the EIDE hard drive interface saw the market, hard drives to an around 10 GB became useable.Nowadays, the IDE or EIDE interface are now called ATA and can use hard drives storage capacity as high as 200 GB and higher.
The Serial ATA is the successor of the ATA interface. It is faster and better suited for today's needs. With a thinner cable that permits a better cooling process plus the interface enhancement, it becomes obvious that the Serial ATA is the way to go right now.
Here is the link for computer cables used to mount a computer. You will also find a link to a detailed page about ATA cables that may help you to better understand the ATA evolution.
Computer Hard Drive Speed, RPM And Memory Cache
The hard drive's Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) determine the platter's rotating speed. The actual speeds found on hard drives are 5400, 7200 and 10000 RPM. Of course, faster the hard drive platter rotates, better the performances will be.Another way hard drives are using to speed up the transfer rate, is what we call the memory cache. The memory cache is a temporary area where stored data are frequently accessed. It is faster to use memory cache than redoing the whole process again and again when a piece of data is frequently used. The actual memory cache found on hard drives go up to 8 MB for a regular hard drive and up to 16 MB for a SCSI hard drive.
Data Storage Capacity
Computer hard drives storage capacity has changed radically. When Pentium I started, hard drives storage capacity was as low as 100 MB. Today hard drives hit the incredible mark of 1 TB, Terabytes, (1024 GB).This enormous change in storage capacity is due to the fast evolution of computer technologies and the greatest change in hard drives storage capacity is due to the platters number and the platters density on a single drive.
The need for such storage capacity has been created by the more demanding softwares and operating systems like Windows XP and Windows Vista. Not to forget the most demanding of all, game softwares and movie files.
It needs so much storage space that a 200 GB hard drive is very common if not the standard in today's computers.
[I hope you appreciated the computer hard drive introduction
and I invite you to take a look at the other guides.]
and I invite you to take a look at the other guides.]
- How to install hard drive step by step
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