To begin with, I'll explain the physical make-up of the hard drive. A hard drive is made up of several key parts. These parts are the electronics, the motor, the platters and the arm. The electronics control how fast the motor spins the platters and how fast the arm moves across the platters. The motor is what physically spins the platters at up to 15,000 RPM. Inside a typical hard drive are four 3.5 inch platters, which are manufactured to extreme tolerances. Platters are usually made of high-precision aluminum or glass disks with layers of magnetic recording material on them. The data is magnetically stored here. The arm holds the read and write heads. The arm moves back and forth at very high speeds from th

Next, the method in which data is logically stored onto a hard drive will be described. Date is stored onto the surface of the platter in sectors and tracks. Tracks are concentric circles; sectors are wedge shaped sections. Sectors always contain a fixed number of bytes. Sectors are usually grouped together into clusters at either the drive or operating system level. Hard drives go through two types of formatting. First there is low-level formatting, which establishes tracks and sectors onto the platter. Low-level formatting prepares the hard drive to store blocks of bytes. Next, there is high-level formatting. This type of formatting writes the file storage structures such as the file- allocation table, often referred to as FAT, into the sectors. This is the process that readies the hard drive to contain files.

Hard drives can be used for many different applications. The most common is the home computer. A hard drive in a personal computer can be used to store anything from documents to media. The size of an average hard drive in a personal computer is 40 gigabytes, however, that number is growing quite rapidly. Another way a hard drive can be used is in a server. A server is a computer used in a network for a specific purpose. It may be a server used to store media files, important documents, or web cont

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Approximate Word count = 899
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)