Hard Drive

By Tyler Downer
2/16/08

Computers store information. That is one of the main reasons we use them, to retrieve information stored on our computer or someone else's'. But where and how is that information stored?

Hard Drives are the answer. Now, unlike some have been led to believe, this is not the entire computer, but a small rectangle in side. Below is the exterior of a typical Hard Drive.

Inside of a hard drive are platters, shown below:

These platters store information in the form of magnetized particles. Magnents in the head, highlighted in blue, orientate the particles in different directions, representing either a 0 or 1. These numbers are then interpreted by the computer into human readable data.

Drive Size

One that most people do know about their computer is the size of their drive. Hard drives are measured in bits. These are extremely small sections of information. These are then bundled in to groups of eight, called bytes. These are the way most people measure their hard drive size. However, bytes are still incredibly small. So, instead of saying that "my hard drive is 16, 101,924,864 bytes in size." We say, "I have a 15 Gigabyte(GB or Gig) drive." (Which is still very small by today's standards. Giga is just one prefix, meaning over 1 billion bytes. There is Megabyte(MB or Meg), which is over 1 million bytes. On some modern computers, there is a Terabyte(TB), which is well over 1 Trillion bytes! That is a lot of storage space for one computer, but 10 years ago, so was 1 Gigabyte. But, for now, most home users are fine with 100-150 GB of drive space.

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