Types of Hard Drives

Series Summary

Hard drives are used to store all the information for a computer to recall. Everything from the operating system to personal information is stored on your computer's hard drive and is able to be recalled at any moment. Although hard drives were originally designed for computers they have expanded to include video recorders, audio players and even cell phones. Almost any electronic device that is able to store data has some form of a hard drive. Inside of a hard drive are several non-magnetic disks with a thin layer of magnetic material on them. The data is stored by magnetic patterns that are encoded in the disks of the drive that represent the information that can later be recalled.

In this free video series you will learn about different types of hard drives and how to connect them to your computer. It will also show you helpful trouble shooting tips for reinstalling Windows after installing your new hard drive as well as adding an additional hard drive to be used as a storage only device.

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is James Adams and I’m here today on behalf of expertvillage.com and I have an A+ certification which certifies me to work on PC’s to fix them, troubleshoot them, hardware, software problems. Also I’m a third year electrical engineering student, and I got into fixing PC’s since I was in high school so I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years. I’ve built too many PC’s to count and I helped too many people to count also. Today, I’m here to talk to you about hard drives. Hard drives can be messy; I mean you got cables, cables, different kinds of cables, power cables, different types of cables, and then the hard drives themselves. They have different connectors; there are different kinds. This is called serial ATA, this is IDE and I’m here today to help you understand why they are important and why you should change them and how to do it. So right here I have two different kinds of hard drives as you can notice they got different pin arrangements; they got different connectors. This one has an old school different connector and this is the newer kind. The top hard drive is a serial ATA. Most computers today come equipped with a serial ATA and most of the older machines and still some of the newer machines have this IDE connector."