Inside Your Computer
The Hard Drive (Also see Alternative Storage Solutions)
A.K.A.
- Fixed Disk
- Hard Disk
- Hard Drive
What Is It?
A box about the size of a VHS video cassette (about 1 inch shorter) containing magnetically coated disks. These disks can hold massive amounts of information.
What Does It Look Like?
What Does It Do?
Hard drives are used to store your software programs and information created from them. Imagine it being a giant filing cabinet inside of your computer, holding all your information.
The benefits of this, is that you can permanently store all of your software programs such as:
- word processors
- spreadsheets
- Games (yeah!)
Years ago when software programs were relatively small, hard drives were not needed. You could just save everything to floppy disks.
But today, software programs take up so much space that you would need 100's even 1000's of floppy disks to hold a single program. Hard drives can store vast amounts of data, are exceptionally fast and become cheaper as technology improves.
Who Makes Them?
Listed below, are some well known manufacturers.
I Must Know More!
- How Hard Disks Work
- What is the churning sound I hear from my hard drive whenever it is retrieving data?
- What does it mean when a hard disk has a "head crash"?
- Sharky Extreme Hard Drive Guide
- How IDE Controllers Work
- How PCI Works
- How SCSI Works
- Seagate Technology Page
- The PC Guide - Hard Drives
- Hard drive performance: 7200 RPM versus 5400 RPM AT-interface disk drives (White Paper)
(Also see Alternative Storage Solutions)