Definition of a hard drive

The computer’s hard drive, which is simply a component within your system, stores your data permanently. When you want to locate a document or look at your pictures, your computer’s operating system locates them on your hard drive and then displays them on your monitor. A simple definition of a hard drive is a sealed device that has the ability to store digital data on self-contained magnetic disks, called platters, that are written to and read by a special head at the end of an arm that works much like a home record player If you imagine a record player, also called a turntable, it has a needle at the end of an arm that plays the music as the record spins. The part of your fixed disk that reads the data is placed extremely close to the spinning platter and is moved very quickly to different areas of the platter where the data needed at that moment is stored.

When you’re using a laptop or desktop computer and you double-click a folder you want to open, the operating system, such as Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, actually tells the hard drive that you’d like to see the contents of that particular folder. folder you double-clicked. The platter inside your system must spin as far as the head can retrieve the magnetically stored data on the hard drive and then send it to the operating system so that Windows can display the contents of the folder on your computer monitor. Now, this is a very basic definition of a hard drive in action because there are actually many components involved in this process, such as the CPU (Central Processing Unit), RAM (Random Access Memory), motherboard, etc.

Basically, the hard drive stores all the information of the computer, such as documents, images and movies, for example. When the computer is turned off and finally turned back on, the data on the hard drive remains intact exactly as expected. This is called permanent storage. The data will remain intact on the hard drive until the computer user permanently deletes the stored data. Without this important system component, there would be no way for us to permanently store large amounts of data.

The hard drive is also often referred to as a fixed drive because once it is mounted inside a desktop, external enclosure, or laptop, it does not need to be removed. If you think of a CD (Compact Disc) or a DVD (Digital Video Disc), each is capable of storing digital data, but obviously they are not fixed in any way. Also, they rely on an optical drive for a computer to read their data. In the case of a laptop or external enclosure, the hard drive is certainly portable, but the drive itself remains securely attached to the laptop or enclosure.