Other glance on computers: Hard Disk Drive
What are Hard Disk Drives? I think you know, however good to quote. Wikipedia says:
A hard disk drive is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, “drive” refers to a device distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an HDD today is typically a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air pressure) with fixed media.
There are a few standards of HDDs. SCSI is used in servers solutions. SATA is going to be most popular. It’s faster and more comfortable than ATA. SATA is the newest of these standards. To connect HDD with your mainbord when you have got SATA drive, you have to use cable slimmer to ATA cable. Using SATA gives you easier control on accurate airflow. I mean ATA cables occupies more capacity.
Today I’ll show you what parts are inside of hard disk drive.
On the bottom of hard disk drives there is always electronic management system. It manages the whole disk. It is a very important part. It is hot as hell sometimes. There is one microchip at least as you see.
Hard Disk Drive is not only electronic elements. There are also platters and actuator parts. I opened two hard disk drives:
The first hard disk drive was amazing built. A great solution was adopted here. That is Segate HDD. The bottom part and the top part are sticked each other by some kind of stick belt. I had to stick this belt out of HDD after I removed the voided sticker. Take a look:
I stick voided sticker out also in the second disk, but there is normal construction, so all I needed was to screw off this HDD:
Next I doffed the electronic board and, after a while, I screw it back :)
After that I pick the bottom lid. Here it is – the heart of hard disk drive!
A platter of hard disk drive is like a mirror:
It is perfectly polished. The reason it is there is very short distance between a head and a platter. There is an awesome picture from Wikipedia where you can see how hard disk drive is built to understand what I am talking about:
Fingerprint is well-seen:
I marked the platter of this hard disk drive. Track is marked by green color and a sector by black.
It is so huge, of course. Normal sectors and tracks are prominently smaller. For example my 160GB Hitachi has got 312579695 sectors:
Finally I decide to run these two disk drives without mainboard. It works!
See more photos at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk
See? Computers aren’t boring. They are so interesting. Take an other glance at them, take an interest in them like me. Enjoy your computer, sir!
Thanks for rrh!
Leave a Reply
May 5th 2009 • 23:05
by ilmarinen
It’s my disk! You’re monster! You’re stupid killer! ;(
May 20th 2009 • 20:05
by b.YISK
It is not, mon, it was :)