Introduction to Characteristics of an Internal Hard disk:
A hard disk is a storage device which is also called as a hard drive or a hard disk drive, in order to store the information and instructions into the hard disk, it has one or many circular platters which are inflexible and make use of the magnetic particles for the storing. Usually, longitudinal recording is used by the hard disks for storing the information, in this approach the magnetic particles are aligned horizontally.
The storage capacity of the hard disks can be increased by using the perpendicular recording for storing the information by aligning the magnetic particles vertically. The determination of the hard disk capacity can be done by considering the number of platters it has, which type of recording is used whether the perpendicular or longitudinal and the alignment of magnetic particles on the platters.
Generally, a platter is prepared with ceramic or aluminium glass and also has a material coating on that and this coating permit the recording of the items on the surface magnetically. Each and every platter consists of two heads on either sides of that and the heads are read and write. A cylinder is a vertical section in a track by which it can be passed across all the platters and this cylinder will refer the location of the write and read heads.
The disk can be classified in to various sections and tracks and this process is called formatting. A narrow recording band which can make a complete circle on the disk’s surface is a track. The storage locations of a disk can be classified into sections which are in pie-shape, and the tracks are broken in to arcs by the sections and these small arcs are called sectors. The platters in the disk drive will revolve when the computer is on; the number of revolutions that the platters rotate is 5,400 revolutions to 15,000 revolutions per a minute.
This will permit the access to all the sectors and tracks on the platters instantly. That means the tracks and sectors of the platters can be accessed automatically. The speed at which the transfer of information, instructions and data is done is called the transfer rate. The item on a storage medium can be located by the storage device and the time taken for locating the items is measured by the access time. The access time is also used to measure the time needed to deliver an item to the processor from the memory.