Hard Drive
Hard drives are a high capacity storage medium which is very prevalent in modern PC’s. All PC’s tend to have a large hard drive which is used to store the operating system, software and user data. As hard drives have a fast transfer rate and a fairly fast access time they provide a good compromise between storage capacity and performance.
Hard drives are a magnetic medium and store data on a hard drive platter. to run slower (due to power drain) and run at 5,400 RPM.
Data is read
and saved using arm and a special read head. The disc will spin and
the arm will travel across the disc. Both these movements mean that
the head can reach every sector on the hard drive. In order to read
or write data a small magnetic flux is introduced. The oxide on the
hard drive platter will remember this flux and as such will store the
data. Computers work with binary and as such only two values will
ever need to be stored which are 1 and 0. Data is then encoded using
standard binary techniques.
Multiple hard drives are sometimes linked together in what is known as a RAID.