Hard Drives

The main type of storage for personal computers is hard drives. These devices are used for efficiently storing huge amounts of data. Inside, drives resemble a record player with a number of magnetic records, known as platters. When saving, an access arm moves across the platters to write data.

Giant hard drives first appeared on the scene in 1956 and were stored in dedicated equipment racks or on the floor. It wasn't until the '80's that drives were small enough to be taken into the home. The first of these personal hard drives was about five inches across and stored the equivalent of one song file. It the last thirty years, drives have shrunken to three inches across while being able to store about 100,000 song files. The storage space of hard drives continues to grow exponentially every year.

Even the largest hard drives available don't offer enough storage space for some power users and most businesses. Because of this, a technology known as RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) was created to combine multiple drives into one large storage space. This tool also allows for the instant creation of data backups. Two similar drives can be set up so that one is a mirror of the other. If one of them were to stop working, the other drive would continue to work as an exact copy of all the data.

Portable entertainment devices, such as MP3 players and smart phones, require large amounts of storage. These devices tend to use internal hard drives to save photos, videos and music files. Traditional hard drives were kept in computers that rarely moved and were easily damaged by being dropped. With portable devices in mind, manufacturers have created drives that are more resistant to shock.

The green movement has led many consumers and businesses to purchases computers that use less power. Hard drives use less power when the internal parts have to move less to read and write data. To maximize this effect, manufacturers have continued to make the drives smaller and more efficient at reading information. They have also worked to make the drives run cooler because large companies have traditionally had to invest a lot of power into cooling their large number of computers.

The average user rarely has to worry about a hard drive failing because the expected lifetime is about three years. In this time, users tend to upgrade to a new computer or larger hard drive. But for users who don't plan to upgrade, manufacturers have created S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) tools. These tools watch the drive and attempt to detect changes that could mean a failure is eminent. Once alerted, this gives the user a chance to make a backup of their data before replacing the failing drive.

External hard drives operate just like those inside of personal computers but often come with their own enclosure to make them portable. This type of drive is typically used for transferring large amounts of data from one computer to another where a network is not available. External drives can also be used for backups of important data.