HDD

Drive hard drive is the main part and usually the largest that has a device data storage in a computer . The operating system , software titles , and most files are stored on the hard drive. The hard disk is also known as ” drive C ” because Microsoft WindowsBy default, the drive letter “C” designates the primary partition within the primary hard drive on a computer. Although this is not a technically correct term to use, it is very common. The hard disk drive is also known as HDD , hard disk , fixed drive , fixed disk, and fixed disk drive .

Characteristics of a hard drive

The main characteristics of the hard disk are the following:

• It has an average access time , which is the average time it takes for the needle to position itself on the track and in the sector to be placed.
• It has an average seek time , which refers to the time it takes for the disc to be placed on the desired track.
• Time Read / Write is the average time it takes for the disk to read or write a new information.
• It has medium latency, which refers to the average time it takes for the needle to locate in the sector that is needed.
• It has an adequate speed of rotation .
• It has a transfer rate that is the speed with which information can be transferred to the computer .
• Track cache .
• Interface .
• Landz which is the area where the heads rest with the computer turned off.

Parties

The parts that a hard drive has are:

• Plato: are the disks that are inside the hard disk drive.
• Face: these are the two sides of a plate.
• Head : number of head for each face.
• Hint : it is a circumference that is inside a face.
• Cylinder : it is a set of several tracks .
• Sector : they are the divisions of a track, their size is not fixed, but the standard is located at 512 bytes .
• Geometric sector : refers to contiguous sectors and different tracks.
• Cluster : It is a contiguous set of sectors.

What is a hard drive for

The hard disk has the function of being in charge of saving and managing all the Software and in addition to storing all the information that is added or that is downloaded to the computer, including the operating system . Without the hard drive, the other components of the computer would not be able to function. It also serves to store videos, audios, texts, games, install programs, save files, manage the operating system.

History

The first hard drive was invented by the company IBM at the beginning of the year 1956 and was created by a commission of the Air Force of the United States . At the beginning it was called RAMAC 305 (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). It consisted of 50 aluminum discs rotating at 3,600 revolutions per minute covered with a magnetic layer . On February 10, 1954, RAMAC 305 was able to read and write successive data becoming the first of what we now call Direct Access Storage Device or DASD .

How does it work

Hard drives use an analog magnetic recording system . It has an arm on which is an electromagnet that is activated to record bits on the discs and then reads them when the magnetized disc produces an electric current on the electromagnet . Inside the casing there are a series of accumulated metal plates that rotate at high speed and on them are placed the heads that are responsible for reading or writing the magnetic impulses .

Inside the hard disk there are several plates which are concentric disks that rotate at the same time. The head is a set of arms that are aligned vertically and that move in or out all at the same time. At the end of the arms we find the read / write heads , which by means of the movement of the head are capable of reading interior and exterior areas of the disk.

Each of the arms is double , and contains 2 heads , one of them is used to read the upper face of the plate, and the other to read the lower face, in this way there are 8 heads to read 4 plates. The read / write heads do not touch the disc but pass very close

Hard disk types

The types of hard disk that exist are the following:

• SAS : they are the most used disks in use in servers, they can be connected up to 6 or 7 meters apart and can cover up to 24 computers .
• SCSI : these are disks that have a very small interface and must have a controller to operate.
• IDE, ATA, and PATA : IDE is short for Integrated Electronic Component . ATA is short for Advanced Contact Technology and PATA is short for Advanced Parallel Technology.
• SATA: represents advanced contact technology and is characterized by operating with a speed close to 150 megabytes per second.
• SATA 2 : It has a better capacity because it works with up to 300 megabytes per second, which makes its response time very good.
• HARD DRIVE SATA 2 differs from SATA in that it performs its activities at 300 Megabytes / second.

Ability

The capacity of the hard disk has managed to reach 6TB today, a capacity much greater than the first commercial models. On a 6TB hard drive we can store for example up to 1,600,000 photos , 615 hours of video and approximately 2,000,000 songs , a storage that probably cannot be completely filled.

Maintenance

There are several steps to follow a preventive maintenance that allows us to have a healthy hard drive. One of them is to maintain enough space because when it runs out, the computer usually begins to have errors in its operation, the applications do not work properly or the computer simply becomes slow .

You should also delete files that are not needed and take into account that Windows applications produce a large number of temporary files recognized by the extension “. tmp ”that should be removed.

Repairs

When the disk fails we must recognize if it is due to mechanical , electronic or sector problems . It is important to mention that when a hard drive starts to fail, sooner or later it will stop working . The hard disk can be repaired depending on the type of damage the disk has.

One of the problems may be of mechanical origin that includes plates , motors or the control electronics , in this case the disk must be taken to a specialized service so that they can recover the data and once they are recovered, a new disk must be purchased hard so that the data can be transferred .

When the problem occurs in the bad sectors that produce loss of data , the disk can be corrected even by some tools for Windows . The most recommended tool to repair hard drives provided with Windows, called CHKDSK , which is an application of Windows versions. The only problem with this application to repair hard drives is that it must be used from the command line , something that users are not used to using.

Another tool to repair damaged hard drives is TestDisk , which repairs errors in the sectors of a hard drive, in the partition table, deleted partitions and can rebuild the boot sector.

Partitions

A partition is the name given to each division that is in a single unit physics of storage of data . In other words, it is like having multiple hard drives on a single drive, each with its own file system and working differently. They can be used to store sensitive data with security measures that do not interfere with the rest of the system and to install different operating systems .

Importance

The hard drive is one of the most important components of a computer because it is the device that allows storage of data long term. It is what allows a computer to run . Without the hard drive the computer could not retain any information .