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What is a hard drive?
Data transfer, considerations when acquiring one.
The hard drive; also known as
secondary memory, is one of the main components of a
personal computer,
it is the place in which all sorts of data is stored, from
product programs (for example:
operative systems), applications (for example:
current accounts system), data and information. |
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The hard drive is a
hermetically sealed box, composed of electromagnetic and
mechanical components that allow to read - write information in
magnetic circular surfaces through read - writer heads.
These magnetic surfaces known as plates are composed of
concentric circles known as tracks, the joint of every
concentric circle of every plate is known as cylinder, and each
track is composed of sectors.
The first sector (starting sector) is the one in charge of
saving the program that reads the partition table, and the
partition table is the one that describes is a hard drive has
one or more primary partitions (four tops), these
partitions
are usually used one by one, as an extended partition; this
partition is used to
create logical partitions, because
operative systems use logical
partitions to the proper function of the computer. |
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Let’s not forget that when
installing a hard drive you need to
be really careful when inserting it, because some motherboards
have a limited capacity and reject hard drives that hold more
than 137 GB, one we are sure our equipment and our operative
system is able of holding this capacity, we can proceed with a
simple installation. |
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Technology goes further every day, a little time
ago we were talking about hard drives of several MB, now we are
talking about GB, and at least 80GB (there are even drives from
several TB, 1TB = 1000 GB), because programs that offer higher
quality and greater service provisions to their users also
require more space of the secondary memory, this is why before
we acquire a hard drive we need to consider the following
aspects: |
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The usage we are going to give to it, the
read-write speed, connectivity, weight, the type of information
we are going to store in it (for example: high quality images,
videos, music: approximately 280 GB), nowadays there is no
specific limit of MB in terms of hard
drives, as the need for memory increases, you will acquire
more hard drives or, in case of needing them, external drives
will be used.
On the other hand, when we want to
transfer data from a hard drive to an external one, we need
to consider our PC’s connectivity and check if it is
the appropriate one to do it (USB ports), |
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because most of the
external drives are plugged through USB (universal serial bus)
cables, the speed of the transfer from an external drive is
always slower when it is been transferred to a hard drive,
because they use different transfer systems.
The procedure of data transfer from a hard drive to an external
or removable one is very simple, when doing it through a USB
cable a logical disk unit appears in our PC (a new letter
appears in our desktop), that is time to perform any data
transfer we want to perform, because for our PC it is just
another disk.
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Tags:
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