Hard disks are one of the most important and also one of the most interesting components within the PC. They have a long and interesting history. At first in 1950s they were large disks up to 20 inches with just a few megabytes capacity. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a mobile phone. It’s very interesting, how engineers develop higher disc capacity, speed, power usage, and much more things. In my report I will talk about hard disc history, capacity, data organizing and main technical things and something about hard disc future. In my life I have had 6 hard discs and only three of them are still working, so I think it is interesting to take a look in it.
The IBM System 305 is the first computer with a hard drive and it had the random access method of controlling data. This device had 50 24-inch diameter aluminum discs painted with special iron paint. It held 5MB- it is about 1% of the space in nowadays flash cards or CD’s.
Typical desktop machine have hard disk with 20 and 200GB capacity. Data is stored in collection of bytes. The bytes might be the ASCII codes of a text file, or instructions of a software application. No matter what it contains, file is simply a string of bytes. When a program requests a file, hard disc sends bytes to the central processor. In hard disk drives data is stored in circles, called tracks. …
