Hard Drives

Electro Magnets and Hard Drives

Electromagnets are in the day to day life of every person around the world and one of the ways that electromagnets affect you today is the transferring of data in the solid form. Of course I am speaking about hard drives. When the storage of a computer is limited and there is a need for more storage in a computer there must be a solution. This solution is hard drives. These storage devices can hold terabytes of information in a single disc allowing for easy transferable data in the physical form. If a person needed the data right away or wanted to work on a project at home hard drives are the easiest way to transfer that material. The evolution of the hard drive has been through a long road first requiring large cumbersome machines to hold and store information, but through the years we have seen inventions for the purpose of storing data, ranging from floppy discs to hard discs and eventually landing upon hard drives.

But how do these hard drives work? At a basic level a hard drive is a recorder and it records your files that you chose magnetically. First the hard drive consists of a platter, a material that is able to be magnetized, then the actuator. The actuator has its arm and the actuator itself. Think of the actuator as a hand taking notes on paper, which is the platter. The platter is where all the information and data is stored in the hard drive. In this platter there are billions of small divisions. Tiny areas that can be told through magnetism either to be a 1 or a 0, thus able to retain the vast amount of information that is it given. After that information is stored that same information must be found once again. An important part of how the data is taken and recorded is how it is stored. When the actuator stores the data when it is taking notes on the platter it is very orderly and set onto circular paths called tracks. Those tracts are then separated into sectors which are easier to locate with a File Allocation Table.