HDD - CS1

HDD

Before you start touching the Hard Drive refer back to the health and safety at the top of this page.

HHD stands for hard disk drive, this is where all of the information that a computer needs is saved, the hard drive is non-volatile, and so anything that you save onto this hard drive won’t disappear if the computer was switched off. The hard drive holds important information like, operating system, programmes and data that you have stored onto the hard drive. This hard drive simply saves by using a platter and a head, what happens is the head changes the magnetic field in the platter slightly, by either changing a number to either a 1 or a 0, this I called binary data, and this is a computers language.

The hard drive can easily be located, if you open up a computer, the hard drive is usually located in a silver rectangular casing, usually only a few inches in length and height, it is mostly stored near the front of the computer, and it has two different cable that it needs to be plugged into the motherboard with, this is a power cable, and a grey wire that usually has 20 pin or 50+ pin connector, and it has many different small wires all connected to one another. The grey cabling is the cable that is used for the Hard Drive to communicate with the motherboard, without it you wouldn’t be able to run a computer system, this is probably one of the most important pieces of hardware for a computer, and they range in sizes, starting from as low as 20 GB (Giga Bytes) to 1 TB (terror byte).

Taking one out and putting another one in is pretty simple, most of them are held in by screws, but some of them have quick release buttons. Just undo the screws and it should slide out, unplug it and then you can plug the new one strait in, it is as simple as that, you have to be careful though, because there are different types of hard drive, SATA and IDE, they both look the same, so I have some ways in which you could identify them.

If you look on the back of the hard drive, there will be a bunch of pins, IDE drives have 50 or more pins on the back, as where as SATA drives don’t have nearly that many pins, also you could identify the board connection, on an IDE drive the pins are spread out roughly over 2 inches or so, the cable that plugs into it is ribbon like and the connector is wide, but a SATA drives connection is similar to a mobile phones connection.