Hard drive

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.

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.

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.

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),

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.