What Is a Hard Drive?
The hard drive is where all your hard data is stored on the computer. When you need to access this data, it is sent through the hard drive to the motherboard. Most are composed of a magnetic spinning disk, but a new style uses no moving parts on the drive.
Connecting the Hard Drive
There are two ways to connect a hard drive:
- IDE: This is an older style of connecting a hard drive to the motherboard. It involves only one slot on the computer.
- SATA: This style uses a SATA cable to connect the SATA slots on the hard drive and motherboard.
Usually computers have plenty of space to mount additional hard drives. For example, Sean's computer has six SATA slots and one IDE slot for additional connections.
The hard drive tends to heat up, so it needs some air flow to cool off. It's a good idea to leave some space above and below it.
RAID
It's possible to connect multiple hard drives to your motherboard. This is called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks).
When you combine multiple drives in a RAID array, your data distributes across the drives. You can read and write the data among the drives in different ways.
For example, a RAID 0 array is when you have a second hard drive connected to the motherboard and the computer reads and writes to both hard drives simultaneously. This allows for a fast reading and writing system. However, in this array the data is intertwined and if one hard drive crashes, the other one will be useless.
References
Meet Our Experts
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Sean Hewitt
Meet Sean Hewitt, a Mahalo Software expert. Sean has spent most of his career in computer construction and repair, working intimately with every version of Windows (from 3.1 to Windows 7) in the process. "Coming from a consulting and repair background," says Hewitt, "I can better understand computer issues and education from a user's perspective."
