The hard disk drive in your system is the "data center" of the PC.

It is here that all of your programs and

data are stored between the occasions that you use the computer. Your hard disk (or disks) are the most
important of the various types of permanent storage used in PCs (the others being floppy disks and
other storage media such as CD-ROMs, tapes, removable drives, etc.) The hard disk differs from the
others primarily in three ways: size (usually larger), speed (usually faster) and permanence (usually fixed
in the PC and not removable).

Your hard disk plays a significant role in the following important aspects of your computer system:

• Performance: The hard disk plays a very important role in overall system performance, probably more
than most people recognize (though that is changing now as hard drives get more of the attention they
deserve). The speed at which the PC boots up and programs load is directly related to hard disk speed.
The hard disk's performance is also critical when multitasking is being used or when processing large
amounts of data such as graphics work, editing sound and video, or working with databases.

• Storage Capacity: This is kind of obvious, but a bigger hard disk lets you store more programs and data.
• Software Support: Newer software needs more space and faster hard disks to load it efficiently. It's
easy to remember when 1 GB was a lot of disk space; heck, it's even easy to remember when 100 MB
was a lot of disk space! Now a PC with even 1 GB is considered by many to be "crippled", since it can
barely hold modern (inflated) operating system files and a complement of standard business software.

• Reliability: One way to assess the importance of an item of hardware is to consider how much grief is
caused if it fails. By this standard, the hard disk is the most important component by a long shot. As I
often say, hardware can be replaced, but data cannot. A good quality hard disk, combined with smart
maintenance and backup habits, can help ensure that the nightmare of data loss doesn't become part of
your life.

Construction and Operation of the Hard Disk To many people, a hard disk is a "black box" of sorts--it is
thought of as just a small device that "somehow" stores data. There is nothing wrong with this approach
of course, as long as all you care about is that it stores data. If you use your hard disk as more than just a
place to "keep stuff", then you want to know more about your hard disk. It is hard to really understand
the factors that affect performance, reliability and interfacing without knowing how the drive works
internally. Fortunately, most hard disks are basically the same on the inside. While the technology
evolves, many of the basics are unchanged from the first PC hard disks in the early 1980s. Photograph of
a modern SCSI hard disk, with major components annotated. The logic board is underneath the unit and
not visible from this angle. Original image © Western Digital Corporation Image used with permission. In
this section we dive into the guts of the hard disk and discover what makes it tick. We look at the various
key components, discuss how the hard disk is put together, and explore the various important
technologies and how they work together to let you read and write data to the hard disk. My goal is to
go beyond the basics, and help you really understand the design decisions and mehedi hasan
[email protected] 15 tradeoffs made by hard disk engineers, and the ways that new technologies are
being employed to increase capacity and improve performance.
what is a hard drive? – definition
By Dinesh Thakur

Hard Disk Drive Definition: It is also called HDD,”disk drive,” (hard drive) or hard
disk is a non-volatile. The hard disk drive is the primary storage unit of
the computer. This is where your data, programs and the Windows system that
is used to make your computer are physically saved in a digital form (string
composed of 0s and 1s). There hard disk capacity is expressed in gigabytes
(GB). More hard disk drive will have a large capacity, the more you can install
programs or store documents in your computer.
We’ll be covering the following topics in this tutorial:

 Types of Computer Hard Disk Drives

 Difference Between Internal & External Hard Disk
 Hard Disk Drive Physical Description
Types of Computer Hard Disk Drives

There are at present two standards discs: ATA-IDE and SATA. The ATA-IDE
standard, although still widespread, is doomed to disappear in favor of SATA. SATA
hard drives are indeed more faster and have a much larger storage capacity.
Difference Between Internal & External Hard Disk

Internal Hard Drive and External Hard Disk share a similar features.
• The main difference is that internal hard drive are installed inside to your desktop
computer or External Hard Disk are connected via USB 2.0.
• Internal hard drive store all of data, while external hard disk is to protection your data
in case corruption takes place.
• Internal hard drive is much faster than an External Hard Disk. The internal drive is
connected advanced technology bus.
Hard Disk Drive Physical Description

A hard disk consists of a stack of disk platters that are made up of aluminum alloy of
glass coated with a magnetic material; actually, most hard disks have from two to eight
platters. Each side of each platter has a read/write head that floats over the surface of
the rapidly spinning disk and picks up (reads) magnetically stored data, or records
(writes) data onto the disk. It’s just like a tape recorder, except that in a hard disk, the
head doesn’t touch the disk surface. Instead, the read/write heads float on an
extraordinarily thin cushion of air, about the height of a fingerprint. Really. That’s why
it’s important not to jostle your hard disk or kick it while it’s doing its work. 
The surface of a disk is divided into imaginary tracks and sectors. Tracks are
concentric circles where the data is stored. These tracks are numbered from the
outermost ring to the innermost ring, starting from zero. Disk sectors refer to the
number of fixed size areas that can be accessed by one of the disk drive’s read/write
heads, in one rotation of the disk, without the head having to change its position. An
intersection of a track and a disk sector is known as track sector. 
Each sector is uniquely assigned a disk address before a disk drive can access a piece
of data. In order to make the disk usable, first it must be formatted to create tracks and
sectors. The track sectors are grouped into a collection known as cluster. It refers to
the basic allocation unit for storage on a disk.

On the hard disk you’ll keep the operating system, and copies of all the software
applications you use, such as your word processor and your spreadsheet program,
plus copies of all the documents or files you create.  The hard drive is sometimes
referred to as the “C drive” due to the fact that Microsoft Windows designates the “C”
drive letter to the primary partition on the primary hard drive in a computer by
default.While this is not a technically correct term to use, it is still common. For
example, some computers have multiple drive letters (i.e. C, D, E) representing areas
across one or more hard drives.
Some computers don’t absolutely need a hard disk for storing things they use floppy
disks instead. But a hard disk drive is much, much faster than a floppy disk drive, and it
stores much more information. And as software programs and operating systems get
more sophisticated, they also take up more disks space-so much disk space that many
programs and systems can’t even fit on a floppy disk. These days, almost every
computer has a hard disk.