How Does a Hard Drive Work?

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Richard Goms and we're here in Salt Lake City, Utah and we are talking about hard drive basics. I'm going to explain to you right now about how a hard drive works. Hard drives like this one which is fairly standard have magnetic platters or metal platters that have magnetic material on them very similar to an audio tape or a video tape that has the magnetic surface and it records bits of information on those magnetic surfaces very similar to the tape drives. There are heads that move back and forth and record on tracks that are sort of invisible positions where the heads position themselves and that information then once it has been recorded is retrievable by those same heads. There is a controller on the back, controller card on the back that controls all the electrical signals that go in and out and tells when it receives a signal from the operating system about where to go and retrieve the information that the program is seeking then it positions the heads over that particular position and reads the data from that position back into the operating system and makes it available to your program. The most common speed, although hard drives come in different speeds, the most common speed that you will find in the stores is 7200 rpm and for most applications this is a very common speed for a hard drive. There may be special applications where you need a faster hard drive or a slower hard drive but for most home and business applications, the 7200 rpm is the most common."