A Brief History Of Hard Drives

By Matthew Kerridge

Hard drives are a very important part of your computer or laptop. Besides finding hard disks in computer you can also find externa drives and other electronic items that use hard disks such as camcorders or video players. Very large computers such as mainframes and supercomputer will actually have more than one hard drive.

The original hard disks were very large and would only contain a few MB. They became called hard disks in order to distinguish them between floppy disks. The section of the hard drive that is hard is the hard platter than contains the magnetic part that holds the information or data. Interestingly enough a hard drive uses the same process or recording as a cassette tape.

The hard platter will be made of either high precision aluminum and very few platters are made of glass. These disks or platters are polished to be very smooth, like mirrors. Your hard disk besides will store allow your data and any of it can be accessed in an instant.

A hard drive can store such large amounts of information because of all of the mentioned features. It also can spin amazingly fast which makes it possible for your computer to run very fast. As the technology improves hard drives will become smaller and smaller and be able to hold even more information.

Hard drives will have a maximum amount of stored energy and your computer will work very fast because of the hard disks high speed spinning. As more research is done and technology improves the amount of information that can be stored will increases while the size of the hard drive will decrease.

Your hard drive will affect your computers performance. This is measured by the seek time or how much information can be sent to your CPU, also known as the data rate. The seek time measures how long it takes your computer to locate the requested information and then transfer it to your CPU. All of your drives will come with a maximum amount of storage space available.

There are many hard drives you can choose from and many are very affordable. Many people will own and additional external hard drive to use as back up for their computer. - 31403

About the Author:

Sign Up for our Free Newsletter

Enter email address here