The hard disk drive is the main, and usually largest, data storage hardware device in a

computer. The operating system, software titles, and most other files are stored in the
hard disk drive.

The hard drive is sometimes referred to as the "C drive" due to the fact that Microsoft
Windows designates the "C" drive letter to the primary partition on the primary hard
drive in a computer by default.

While this is not a technically correct term to use, it is still common.

For example, some computers have multiple drive letters (e.g,. C, D, and E)
representing areas across one or more hard drives. The hard disk drive also goes by
the name HDD (its abbreviation), hard drive, hard disk, fixed drive, fixed disk, and fixed
disk drive.

Popular Hard Disk Drive Manufacturers

A few of the most popular hard drive manufacturers include Seagate, Western
Digital, Hitachi, and Toshiba.

You can usually buy these brands of hard drives, and ones from other manufacturers, in
stores and online, like through the company's own sites as well as sites like Amazon.

Hard Disk Drive Physical Description

A hard drive is usually the size of a paperback book, but much heavier.

The sides of the hard drive have predrilled, threaded holes for easy mounting in the 3.5-
inch drive bay in the computer case. Mounting is also possible in a larger 5.25-inch
drive bay with an adapter. The hard drive is mounted so the end with the connections
faces inside the computer.

The back end of the hard drive contains a port for a cable that connects to
the motherboard. The type of cable used (SATA or PATA) depends on the type of drive
but is almost always included with a hard drive purchase. Also here is a connection for
power from the power supply.

Most hard drives also have jumper settings on the back end that define how the
motherboard is to recognize the drive when more than one is present.

These settings vary from drive to drive, so check with your hard drive manufacturer for
details.

How a Hard Drive Works

Unlike volatile storage like RAM, a hard drive keeps a hold of its data even when
powered off. This is why you can restart a computer, which powers down the HDD, but
still have access to all the data when it's back on.

Inside the hard drive are sectors located on tracks, which are stored on rotating platters.
These platters have magnetic heads that move with an actuator arm to read and write
data to the drive.

Kinds of Hard Drives

The computer hard drive isn't the only kind of hard drive, and SATA and PATA aren't
the only ways they can connect to a computer. What's more is that there are many
different sizes of hard drives, some very small and others rather large.

For example, the common flash drive has a hard drive too, but it doesn't spin like a
traditional hard drive. Flash drives have solid state drives built-in and connect to the
computer through USB.

Another USB hard drive is the external hard drive, which is basically a hard drive that's
been put into its own case so that it's safe to exist outside the computer case. They
usually interface with the computer over USB but some use FireWire or eSATA.

An external enclosure is a housing for an internal hard drive. You can use one if you
want to "convert" an internal hard drive into an external one. They, too, use USB,
FireWire, and so forth.

Storage Capacity

The hard disk drive capacity is a huge factor in determining whether someone will buy a
particular device like a laptop or phone. If the storage capacity is rather small, it means
it will fill up with files faster, whereas a drive that has lots and lots of storage can handle
much more data.

Choosing a hard drive based on how much storage it can retain is really up to opinion
and circumstance.

If you need a tablet, for example, that can hold lots of videos, you'll want to be sure to
get the 64 GB one instead of the 8 GB one.

The same is true for computer hard drives. Are you one to store lots of HD videos or
pictures, or are most of your files backed up online? An offline, at-home storage
preference might drive you to buy an internal or external hard drive that supports 4 TB
versus a 500 GB one. See Terabytes, Gigabytes, & Petabytes: How Big Are They?if
you're not sure how these units of measurement compare.

Common Hard Disk Drive Tasks

One simple task that you can do with a hard drive is change the drive letter. Doing this
lets you refer to the drive using a different letter. For example, while the main hard drive
is normally called the "C" drive and can't be changed, you might want to change an
external hard drive's letter from "P" to "L" (or any other acceptable letter).

You need to format the drive or partition the drive into sections before you can install an
operating system or store files. Upon installling the OS for the first time is usually when
a new hard drive is formatted and given a file system,;otherwise a disk partition tool is a
common way to manipulate the drive in this way.

When you're dealing with a fragmented hard drive, free defrag tools are available that
can help reduce the fragmentation.

Since a hard drive is where all the data in a computer is actually stored, it's a common
task to want to securely erase the data from the drive, like before selling the hardware
or reinstalling a new operating system.

This is usually accomplished with a data destruction program.

Hard Disk Drive Troubleshooting

The hard drive in your computer is used over and over, each time you're doing
something that involves reading or writing data to the disk. It's normal, then, to
eventually run into a problem with the device.

One of the most common issues is a hard drive that's making noise, and the best first
step in troubleshooting a hard drive malfunction of any kind is to run a hard drive test.

Windows includes a built-in tool called chkdsk that helps identify and maybe even
correct various hard drive errors. You can run the graphical version of this tool in
most versions of Windows.

Lots of free programs can test a hard drive for issues that might ultimately lead to you
needing to replace the drive. Some of them can also measure performance like
the seek time.
Components of a hard drive

A hard drive consists of hard disk assembly and front read/write control circuit. Hard disk drive assembly
belongs to mechanical device and every component of the assembly is composed of high precision
machinery parts. The front read-write control circuit is made up of a group of complex circuits and is
responsible for the modulation of exchanging the signal types between hard drive and CPU and also
amplifies them.

1. Hard Disk Assembly

Hard Disk Assembly is the hardcore of a hard drive, which includes platters, spindle motor, read/write
magnetic heads, actuator motor and so on.

Now let’s have a close look of each part:

Platters: the platters of a hard drive consist of one or more overlapped flat circular disks, which holds the
recorded data. The surface of these overlapped metallic disks is extremely flat and smooth and is covered
with a thin layer of magnetic material. These disks are separated by washers.

From physical point of view, platter is divided into Magnetic surface, Track, Cylinder and Sector.

Magnetic surface: Magnetic surface refers to the upper or lower side of a disk. The upper side of the first
disk is side 0, the lower side of the first disk is side 1, the upper side of the second disk is side 2...

Read/write magnetic head: As every side has a corresponding read/write head, we can call these magnetic
heads head 0, head 1, head 2…

Track: tracks are the thin concentric circular on a disk divided when formatting the disk. The outermost
track is called track 0 and towards the center of magnetic surface are track 1, track 2… and the most
central part is called Landing Zone, and data won’t be recorded there. Landing Zone is the position where
the magnetic head starts and stops.
Cylinder: Tracks with the same radius of all the disks can form a barrel-like figure called Cylinder.
Cylinder can be used to calculate the logical disk capacity.

Sector: Sector is the basic unit for disc storing data, which is the area between the two adjacent radiuses
after dividing each track into equal segments. Then, it is not difficult to understand why every track has
the same number sectors. The beginning of a sector contains the unique ID of a sector. The sectors are
separate by gaps, which can be conveniently recognized by the operating system. Sectors are numbered
from 1.

Spindle motor: spindle motor is specially used to drive the disk to spin with high speed. The rotation rate
of the recent popular hard drive is between 5400 revolutions per minute/rpm and 7200 rpm. 10000 rpm
belongs to high speed hard drive. The rotation rate of hard drives used by network server and some
graphic processing devices is generally varying from 15000rpm to 2000rpm. Some are even higher.

Read/write magnetic head: read/write magnetic head is responsible for transforming the platters’
magnetic field into electrical current when read and write data.

Actuator motor: actuator motor is used to drive the magnetic head to actuate. Actuator motor and
magnetic head are connected by actuator arm.

2. Front Read/Write Control Circuit

Front read/write control circuit is also called pre-amplifier circuit. It has two main functions:

First, it is used to convert binary code to analog signals. When the data needs to be written, it is the binary
code representing the data that is transferred from the center processing system to the magnetic head.
This circuit must be passed by those binary codes. Then it is able to convert those binary codes to analog
signals that can change the current size and transfer the analog signals to the magnetic head.
Second: it is responsible for converting binary code to analog signals and amplifies the signals. When
reading data, what the magnetic heads obtain is the current generated from the magnetic field. When the
current is transferred to the center processing system, it also must pass through the preamplifier circuit.
At this moment, this circuit will convert the current which represents the analog signal to the central
processing system recognizable binary code, and amplify the weak signal.

Now let’s learn something about the hard drive types:

Basically, there are four types of hard drive types: IDE hard drive, fibre channel hard drive, SATA hard drive
and SCSI hard drive.

1. IDE hard drive

IDE is short for Integrated Drive Electronics. It originally refers to hard disk drive that combines the hard
drive controller and platters together. This method will reduce the cable number and length of a hard
drive interface and also the reliability of data transmission is enhanced. Besides, it becomes easier to
produce hard drives. As to users, the hard drive installation is more convenient. IDE hard drive has been
developing since it is born. Its cheap price and strong compatibility make it irreplaceable by other types of
hard drives.

2. Fibre channel hard drive

Fibre Channel is primarily designed for network system. However, with the storage system’s increasing
need for speed, it is slowly used in hard drive system. A fibre channel hard disk is developed to improve
the speed and flexibility of the hard drive storage system. Its appearance improves the communication
speed of multiple hard drives. The main features of fibre channel are hot-swap, high speed bandwidth,
remote connection and greater number of connected devices. Fibre channel is designed for multiple hard
drives environment like servers and it can satisfy the requirements for high data transmission rate.

3: SATA hard disk

SATA hard disk using the SATA interface and another name of it is Serial interface hard disk. It is the main
development direction of future PC. Serial ATA uses a serial connection mode, and Serial ATA transmits
the data in serial mode and it only transmits 1 bit of data at one time, which can reduce the number of
pins of SATA interface and also make the connecting cable number fewer. As a result, the efficiency will be
higher. It also has the stronger error correction capability. Once the error is found, it will correct it
automatically, so this greatly improves the security of the data transmission. The new SATA uses a
differential-signal- amplified- system, and this system can effectively filter the noise from the normal
signal. In addition, Serial interface has the advantages of simple structure and supporting hot-plugging.

4: SCSI hard disk

SCSI hard disk refers to Small Computer System Interface. This interface type is totally different from IDE
interface. The IDE interface is the standard interface of PC, but SCSI is not, it uses the 50 pin interface and
the appearance of the interface is similar to the general hard disk. As SCSI hard disk has good
performance, high stability, a wide range of applications, multitasking, large bandwidth, low CPU
occupancy rate, hot-plugging and other advantages, it is widely used on the server. But its high price
makes it difficult to become popular like IDE hard, so SCSI hard disk is mainly used in high-grade, high-
end servers and workstations.
What is hard disk drive?
A hard disk drive (often shortened as hard disk, hard drive, or HDD) is a non-volatile
storage device that stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating rigid (i.e. hard)
platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, “drive” refers to the motorized
mechanical aspect that is distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or
a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an
HDD today is typically a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air
pressure) with fixed media.

How hard drive works?

A hard disk is a sealed unit containing a number of platters in a stack. Hard disks may
be mounted in a horizontal or a vertical position. In this description, the hard drive is
mounted horizontally.

Electromagnetic read/write heads are positioned above and below each platter. As the
platters spin, the drive heads move in toward the center surface and out toward the
edge. In this way, the drive heads can reach the entire surface of each platter.

Hard drive physical components

PLATTERS:
Platter is a circular, metal disk that is mounted inside a hard disk drive. Several platters
are mounted on a fixed spindle motor to create more data storage surfaces in a smaller
area. The platter has a core made up of aluminium or glass substrate, covered with a
thin layer of Ferric oxide or cobalt alloy. On both sides of the substrate material, a thin
coating is deposited by a special manufacturing technique. This, thin coating where
actual data is stored is the media layer.

When the magnetic media is applied to the surface of the substrate material, a thin
lubricating layer is applied to protect the material. This complex three layered media is
discussed in detail as follows:

THE SUBSTRATE MATERIAL:

The bulk material of which platters are made up, forms the base on which media layer is
deposited. The substrate has no specific function but to support the media layer. The
most commonly used material for making this physical layer is an Aluminium alloy. This
alloy is rigid, lightweight, stable, inexpensive, easy to work with and is readily available.
Earlier, since the gap between the heads and the platter was relatively high, the platter
surface being smooth and flat was less of an issue. However, as technology advances,
the gap between heads and platters is decreasing and the speed that the platters spin
at is increasing. For this reason demand for alternatives on the platter material are
increasing. Glass platters are replacing aluminium platters because they provide
improved rigidity, better quality, thinner platters, and thermal stability.

MEDIA LAYER:
The substrate material forms the base upon which actual recording media is deposited.
The media layer is a thin coating of magnetic material applied to the surface of the
platters and where the actual data is stored. Its thickness is only a few millionths of an
inch.

Special techniques are employed for the deposition of magnetic material on the
substrate material. A thin coating is deposited on both sides of the substrate, mostly by
vacuum deposition process called magnetron sputtering. Another such method is
electroplating, using a process similar to that used in electroplating jewelry.

PROTECTIVE LAYER:
On the top of the magnetic media, is applied a super-thin, protective, lubricating layer.
This layer is called the protective layer because it protects the disk from damage
caused by accidental contact from the heads, “head crash” or other foreign material
from entering the drive

PLATTER DIVISIONS:
In order to get maintain the organized storage and retrieval of data the platters are
organized into specific structures. These specific structures include tracks, sectors, and
clusters.

TRACKS:
Each platter is broken into thousands of tightly packed concentric circles, known as
tracks. These tracks resemble the structure of annual rings of a tree. All the information
stored on the hard disk is recorded in tracks. Starting from zero at the outer side of the
platter, the number of tracks goes on increasing to the inner side. Each track can hold a
large amount of data counting to thousands of bytes.
SECTORS:
Each track is further broken down into smaller units called sectors. As sector is the
basic unit of data storage on a hard disk. A single track typically can have thousands of
sectors and each sector can hold more than 512 bytes of data. A few additional bytes
are required for control structures and error detection and correction.

CLUSTERS:
Sectors are often grouped together to form Clusters.

READ/WRITE HEADS:
The heads are an interface between the magnetic media where the data is stored and
electronic components in the hard disk. The heads convert the information, which is in
the form of bits to magnetic pulses when it is to be stored on the platter and reverses
the process while reading.

The heads are the most sophisticated part of the hard disk. Each platter has two
read/write heads, one mounted on the top and the other one at the bottom. These
heads are mounted on head sliders, which are suspended at the ends of head arms.
The head arms are all fused into a singular structure called actuator, which is
responsible for their movement.

THE SPINDLE MOTOR:

Spindle motor plays an important role in hard drive operation by turning the hard disk
platters. A spindle motor must provide stable, reliable, and consistent turning power for
many hours of continuous use. Many hard drive failures occur due to spindle motor not
functioning properly
HARD DISK LOGIC BOARD:
Hard disk is made with an intelligent circuit board integrated into the hard disk unit. It is mounted
on the bottom of the base casting exposed to the outer side. The read/write heads are linked to
the logic board through a flexible ribbon cable.

DRIVE BAY:
The entire hard disk is mounted in an enclosure designed to protect it from the outside
air. It is necessary to keep the internal environment of the hard disk free of dust and
other contaminants. These contaminants may get accumulated in the gap between the
read/write heads and the platters, which usually leads to head crashes.

The bottom of the disk is also called base casting. The drive mechanics are placed in
the base casting and a cover, usually made up of aluminium is placed on top to enclose
heads and platters. The entire contents placed on the base and cover chamber are
collectively known as the head-disk assembly. Once this assembly is opened, it would
instantly contaminate the contents and eventually ruin the drive.
On the bottom of the base casting is present the logic board, which is separated from
the base casting using a cushioning material.

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