What Is A Hard Drive}

What is a Hard Drive

by

Owen P Kerridge

Most Standard Hard Drives include one or more rotating discs attached to a small motor within a case. The Digital Data is recorded onto the disk magnetically by read/write heads situated above and below the disk.

IBM brought the first Hard Drive into production back in 1956. Since then as technology has progressed, the Drive has got smaller in size and much bigger in capacity. This has ensured their spot as the most used mass secondary storage device in general purpose computers today. These days Hard Drives generally run on the SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) or SAS (Serial attached Small Computer System Interface) systems making them very quick at reading and writing data.

Back before PCs, Laptops and netbooks were widely available, Hard Disks were by todays standards very large. Typical Drives of the time were the DEC RP06 which was the size of a washing machine and only had a storage capacity of 178Mb.

As technology advanced and Floppy Disk Drives (FDD) were introduced, the Hard Drive became smaller so that they would fit into the same moldings that were designed for the FFD. As this developed Form Factors were introduced which led to Hard Drives being available in 3 main sizes; 8 inch, 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch.

Since the late 80s we have seen the developments of the 2.5 inch drive, primarily used for Laptops and Netbooks and game consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360.

As evolution moves forward so the external dimensions of the drives have decreased. In 1993 Integral Peripherals brought the 1.8 inch drive to production which was adopted in many Hard Drive based Digital Audio Players. More recently Toshiba announced an 0.85 inch Drive that has been adopted into many Mobile Phones which currently holds the Guinness World Record for the smallest 8Gb Hard Drive (MK8003MTD).

Currently all manufactures have stopped any development in the 1.3 inch, 1 inch and 0.85 inch Hard Drives due to the falling prices in the much faster Flash Memory

Current Hard Drive Sizes are:

3.5 inch with a capacity up to 3Tb (3072Gb or 3145728Mb)

2.5 inch with a capacity up to 1.5Tb (1536Gb or 1572864Mb)

1.8 inch with a capacity up to 320Gb (327680Mb)

Owen P Kerridge is a great authority on the computer

Hard Drive

and many other areas of consumer electronics such as Laptops, PCs Netbooks, HD TVs and much more. For further info please visit Ebuyer.com.

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What is a Hard Drive}