How Do Computer Hard Drives Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews and today I'm going to explain to you how computer hard drives work. I have a diagram on my computer that I'm going to pull up. And this is basically the parts of a hard drive kind of taken apart to where you can see each individual one. Now hard drive is basically if you looked inside your computer it would be like a block, maybe be a little bit larger then an index card and that is a basically a block of metal and these are the parts that are inside of that hard drive. You have a what's called a read head right here, and you also have platters. Now these platters are basically if you look at it, it looks like a CD but instead of being like a CD it uses magnetism to store data. What happens is when your hard drive is spinning up is these platters inside of your hard drive will spin very, very fast. And they'll spin constantly. Some will spin at fifty four hundred rpms others will spin at seventy two hundred. There's even a ten thousand rpm hard drives and higher. Now what rpm does for you is the faster this spins conceivably the faster that hard drive is going to be able to read data and certain conditions. But basically wrapped around this platter if you follow my little hand here, kind of growing out as it goes around are strips basically of data. And that data is stored magnetically little a, it will either be a part that has no magnetism or a part that does have magnetism. And this read head will scroll around on this hard drive to different parts of it and it will as it spins pull that data off that hard drive. If it is a magnetized area of the hard drive it will read a one, if it's not a magnetized area of the hard drive it will read a zero. And you combine all those little ones and zeros together and you get the data off of the hard drive. And that is how a hard drive works. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just described to you how a computer hard drive works."