Hard Drive

The hard disk drive (HDD) stores information permanently until you delete it. It acts like a human’s long term memory. When hard drives were first introduced by IBM, they were as big as two fridges and only held around 3.75mb(Megabyte – A million bytes) of data. The technology has come a long way as there are now hard drives that are as small as an adult’s palm and hold more that 4tb(Trillion bytes) of data. Hard drives use magnetism to read and write data on itself. Hard drives use file systems to determine how big each block of data is on the disk drive. The two main types of file systems are NTFS and FAT32. NTFS(New Technology File System) is a file system developed by Microsoft. It supersedes the FAT32 file system, by being faster, safer, space efficient, and larger space per file. The FAT32 file system however is much simpler, and therefore used in flash drives and SD cards and is more universal. Hard drives are also split into two different types; SATA (Serial ATA) and PATA (Parallel ATA).