Whatever you own on your computer, it will be on hard drive. From videos, songs, and pictures to programs and preferences, they are all on your computer hard drive. What else you can expect? Even operating system resides on hard disk!
But have you ever wondered how they actually get stored?
To understand how the data is stored on a hard drive completely, you need to first have knowledge on the working of hard drive.
Generally, the hard drive consists of discs placed one on top of another with a gap of few millimeters. We call these discs as “Platters”, which have the capability to hold large amount of data.
Next comes the Arm, which is specially meant to read and write data on the disc. This arm plays an important role in storing the information by stretching out on the platters and moving over them from centre to edge through tiny heads that floats over the platter.
Storage
Usually, the hard drive stores data in the form of zeros and ones.
Whenever you save a file or any information, the “Write” head on the Arm writes the data onto the platter as it spins at high RPM (Revolutions per Minute), often in the range of 4,000.
However, the file just doesn’t disappear anywhere as the computer must be able to locate the file later. When you attempt to open it, the hard drive should locate that particular file. To understand how it works, let’s take an example –
You are trying to open an image file. Now, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) will inform about the file you are attempting to open. The hard drive will spin fast and finds out the image within nano seconds of time. Then, the drive reads the image and send to CPU back, which further be displayed on your computer screen.
One more instance –
Editing an image, where the hard drive has to save all the changes made on the file! If you click on “Save”, the information along with edited ones will be sent to the CPU which in turn processes it and sends it to the hard drive for storage. Now the hard drive will spin up and the arm will use its “Write” heads to overwrite the previous image with the modified one. That’s all!
Note – Read and Write operations on hard drive will not disturb or delete any other information already available on the drive. That’s why the discs or platters are separated into sectors and tracks. Here, the tracks are the long circular divisions, whereas the sectors represent the small sections of tracks.
This is what the hard drive in your computer does in storing up the data. Now, let us wrap up this discussion with a friendly word of advice:
One of the sad truths about hard drives is, when it is damaged all the data present on it will be lost. But is possible to recover data from hard disks using reliable tools. This is why the reason you need to have a backup system plan on regular basis, so that you can easily escape from data loss cases if you come across any.
Get another hard drive and copy all your important files onto that.
