What Is the Definition of Disk Drive?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Noah and today we're going to learn about the definition of a disk drive. The disk drive is a device that reads data from, and writes data onto a disc. What it does is it rotates the disc very fast and then it has one or several heads which reads and writes the data from. There are several different types of disk drives though. First of all, we have hard disk drives. These just have one hard disk which can be re-written over and over again. Then we also have floppy disk drives, which are the older kind of removable disk drives. Here we can insert floppies in and out, and the disk will write and read data from the floppy disk. Finally, we have optical disk drives, which are basically better known as CD or DVD players. The other thing is that with a computer, you can have internal or external drives. For example, here, we have an external hard drive which is plugged into the computer for a USB cable. Now that we've seen the hardware aspect of disk drives, let's see what all this looks like from a computer screen. To do that, simply go to My Computer on your desktop. Double-click on it, and here we'll be able to see all the kind of different disk drives which we have. First we can see a hard disk drives. Here, we have three. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we have three physical hard drives, because one can be split into several partitions to make the computer believe that there are several of them. Next, we can see what the computer calls devices with removable storage. This includes the floppy drive, and also our two optical disk drives, in other words, these are our CD and DVD players on the computer."