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ICQ# 16388743
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HARD DRIVE 101
The Platter
It looks like your 3.5-inch
floppy disk or a CD, but it can store a lot more data. Most platters are made up
of an aluminum alloy (it is very light weight) it is coated with a film of some
magnetically sensitive material. There are two ways of doing this. A compound
syrup mixture is poured and then spun on the platter to evenly distribute the
film over the entire platter. The main ingredient (iron oxide) is why many
platters that you see are brownish-orange in color. The other main media
consists of a thin film of a cobalt alloy and is placed on the platter through
electroplating. Some companies have started to use glass platters, which can be
made much thinner than the aluminum kind and can better resist the heat that is
produced when in use. The Read/Write Arm
An actuator mechanism (located where it says magnet) moves the read/write arm across the platter surfaces in an arc to read / write the data on your drive.
The
Read/Write Heads There was only one read/write head on this drive. It was located at the very end of the read/write arm; it reads the topside side of the platter. The tiny read/write head on the end of each arm are not actually touching the platter surface; it rides on a cushion of air so small that a particle of dust could screw up your entire drive. Now what is very
interesting about the hard drive is that the data that is stored on the platter
starts from the center of the platter then works it’s way out. So if you have
the platter half full, the arm moves the head only half way where the last data
is. When you have the whole platter full and start to delete data from it what
you are doing is making holes of empty space in the platter, in turn, making the
arm move a lot more. By defragging your hard drive you are correcting this.
What you are doing when you defrag is getting all the data from the outside edge
and moving it in closer to the center so the arm moves less in turn speeding up
your hard drive.
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