holy hard drive batman! mega info post!
Posted: May 27, 2007
i remember when i took apart my first hard drive. it was literally my first hard drive from 1997 weighing in at a whopping 1.4gb and it was larger than most modern 500gb drives. it had windows 95 on it but i later upgraded it all the way to the fantasmic 98se. like all hard drives it’s shelf life finally expired and was rendered useless - so i did what any adhd guy would do and i decided to take it apart. at the time i had a loose understanding of how a hard drive worked but once i saw what was inside i was baffled.
if it is difficult for you to wrap your mind around how a phonograph works then this would blow your mind. i say that because i am one of those people. since the drive was toast, i tore all of it’s guts out and the only practical parts i found were these two magnets. which soon made their way to my fridge to hold up heavy things since they were so powerful. killer story i know.
Q: BUT GEE WHIZ MR. DIGGLES HOW DO THEY WORK?
A: well i am glad you asked.
HDDs record data by magnetizing a magnetic material in a pattern that represents the data. They read the data back by detecting the magnetization of the material. A typical HDD design consists of a spindle which holds one or more flat circular disks called platters, onto which the data is recorded. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually glass or aluminum, and are coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. Older disks used iron oxide as the magnetic material, but current disks use a cobalt-based alloy. The platters are spun at very high speeds. Information is written to a platter as it rotates past mechanisms called read-and-write heads that fly very close over the magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetization of the material immediately under it. There is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm (or access arm) moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins.get it? neither do i.
it is weird to think that these little drives currently store the most important information our world has ever known. such as who really killed john fabert kennedy. if you are dying to know more about HD’s then click here to read about hard-drives on wikipedia.
and now you know,
and knowing is half the battle.
Related posts:
Leave your thoughts with me...
Trackback URL Comment feed