Hard Drives for Not Yet Techies

Hard drives are also called hard disks or hard disk drives. They store what your computer needs to know to operate and computer. The code for your operating system is stored there, all your programs and your files, whether a spreadsheet report to turn in to your boss next Tuesday or 500 real cool MP3s. Without hard drives computers would be like people with amnesia.

Their capacity is measured in megabytes. My first hard drive was all of 129 megs. I doubt that would hold Windows itself now. Now you want a hard drive that contains up to or more than 100 gigabytes. One gigabyte is 1000 megabytes.

The two common types of hard drives are IDE and SCSI. Both are about the size of disk drives, but have wider ribbon cables. IDE uses a 1.5 inch wide, 40-pin ribbon while SCSI uses a 2 inch wide, 50-pin cable. Drives usually have the controller built into the motherboard.

If you run out of room on your hard drive (because it's full of MP3 files, for example) but are otherwise satisfied with your computer and don't want to spend the money to upgrade by buyer an brand new computer, you can simply buy and install a second hard drive.

They are a set of stacked disks like phonograph records. The data on them is recorded electromagnetically in concentric circles or tracks. A head, which acts sort of like an old phonograph arm, reads or writes information to the tracks.

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