Magnetic Disk Drives
Overview of Hard Drives (Hard Disk Drives, HDDs)
Hard disk drives are so named because they contain hard magnetic disks inside the housing. They are designed to store large quantities of information, and they don't need to be continuously powered in order to hold that data. The vast majority of PCs used today have at least one hard drive, and in almost all of these, the hard drive is used to store the OS, programs, and data. When a computer boots, depending on BIOS settings, the computer searches for boot files on different disk drives, most commonly the floppy drive first, then the hard drive, and then a CD drive. For regular use on any modern PC, the hard drive is the only one that is big enough to hold the required files. In fact, PCs that don't use hard drives are beyond the scope of this site. Figure 6.1 shows a typical PC hard drive. Note that laptop hard drives are physically much smaller.
Figure 6.1: A standard PC EIDE hard drive.
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