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How Hard Disks Work - Nearly every desktop computer and server in use today contains one or more hard-disk drives. Every mainframe and supercomputer is normally connected to hundreds of them. You can even find VCR-type devices and camcorders that use hard disks instead of tape. These billions of hard disks do one thing well -- they store changing digital information in a relatively permanent form. They give computers the ability to remember things when the power goes out. In this article, we'll take apart a hard disk so that you can see what's inside, and also discuss how they organize the gigabytes of information they hold in files! Hard Disk Basics Hard disks were invented in the 1950s. They started as large disks up to 20 inches in diameter holding just a few megabytes. They were originally called "fixed disks" or "Winchesters" (a code name used for a popular IBM product). They later became known as "hard disks" to distinguish them fro...

How to Deaden Sound on a Computer - More powerful PCs mean more powerful cooling fans, which translates into more noise. All computers and audio/video systems have built in fans that keep the hard drive and the CPU cool. Hard drives also vibrate and can even cause the case to vibrate. The more systems around and the larger the systems, the noisier it will be. Small fans, which are built into computers, must run fast in order to cool down the system. They create a high-pitched noise that can be quite annoying [source: Grossman]. We will now give you some suggestions about what to do to deaden the sound coming from your computer. Install gaskets Installing polymer gaskets around the vibrating fans will reduce the noise. These gaskets are readily available for purchase. Tighten any loose screws Quite often the vibrating sound emanating from your computer is the result of loose fans and motors. This can be remedied by tightening all the screws holding these components in place. Simpl...

Why does my PC try to access my floppy disk drive when there is no diskette in it? - If you have a Windows PC, you will sometimes get into a situation where the computer randomly access the floppy disk drive every few minutes -- for no apparent reason! Typically, the harmless annoyance occurs because some program "thinks" it needs to read or write some data to a diskette.   In most cases, there may be a document in your recent history folder (Start >> Documents) that was once on a diskette. Here are the steps to clear the document history file Windows uses: Click Start Click Settings Click Taskbar In the Documents area, click Clear Click OK Other causes of the problem: Microsoft Office's Find Fast utility may be running and trying to index your FDD. Remove it from the Startup group, or in Control Panel, look for Find Fast and disable it from starting. Find Fast installs automatically with Office and can be a resource hog as well! The System Agent may...

What is the churning sound I hear from my hard drive whenever it is retrieving data? - Let's say you do something simple like double-click on the icon for a spreadsheet file. This simple act, on many computers, can take 20 or 30 seconds to complete, and all during that time the hard disk is churning away. The hard-disk access light flickers and the drive might make a whirring, whizzing or high-pitched whining noise. If the mechanism in the drive is loud, you definitely know that something is going on! In the article How Hard Disks Work, you can see that there is an arm that holds the read-write heads. This arm can move the heads to tracks near the hub or near the edge of the disk. A normal hard disk is 5 inches (12.5 cm) or so in diameter. This arm, therefore, can move about 2 inches (5 cm) across the face of the disk. The speed at which this arm can move is astonishing. The arm is very light, and its actuator is powerful and precise. The arm can slide across the face of the...

What is a virtual hard drive? - As more and more of our lives began to be stored on a computer, tablet or phone that replaced filing cabinets, book cases, rolodexes, photo albums and CD towers, we quickly had to confront the fact that there's only so much space on a device for your work documents when you have such a staggering array of anime that needs digital room to live. One solution is the hard drive. This is the physical place in your computer that holds the hard disk where all the files and information on your machine is digitally stored. For what seems like forever -- or at least since the advent of personal computing -- this has been a handy and completely sufficient option. For one, we didn't always have that large of a digital footprint; after all, we've only been using computers and digital technology for a short period of time. But as time went on and more of our lives started collecting inside our computers and devices, more space was needed. Floppy dis...

10 Things Wearables Have Taught Us About Ourselves  -Start the Countdown Back in 1980, the height of nerdy chic was the Casio C-80 calculator watch. This boxy little bad boy had a stopwatch, a full numeric keyboard and dedicated buttons for all of your favorite basic mathematical functions (sorry trigonometry fans, no sin or cos). And it told time! Fast forward to 2015. With all of the groundbreaking technological innovations we've witnessed in the past 35 years – including the advent of the Internet, e-mail, HDTVs, smartphones, touchscreens – the most hotly anticipated high-tech gadget of the year is ... a watch. The Apple Watch, debuting in 2015, is the latest iteration of wearable technology, or "wearables" as the industry types say. In 2014, consumers worldwide bought around 21 million wearable devices for tracking their physical activity, monitoring their sleep, counting calories and generally making themselves feel superior to people without such gadgets ...

What does it mean when a hard disk has a head crash? - In the article How Hard Disks Work, you can see that the read/write heads do not touch the platters in the drive. When the platters spin up, they rotate at anywhere between 3,600 rpm and 7,200 rpm. To the head, the platter seems to be moving at about 150 mph, and a very thin cushion of air forms between the head and the platter so that the head "flies" over the platter. If even the smallest bit of dust makes its way onto the platter, the flight is disrupted and the head "crashes" into the platter, scratching it. The crash, of course, sprays a lot more dust and debris onto the platter and then it's all over. The other thing that can cause a squealing sound is the bearings in the drive motor. That is another common way for a drive to fail. Hard disks are amazingly reliable these days, with "Mean Time Between Failures" (MTBF) of 500,000 to 1,000,000 hours. That means that, on average, a drive...

How Solid-state Drives Work - In 1956, IBM shipped the world's first hard disk drive, or HDD, in the RAMAC 305 system. The drive used 50 24-inch (61-centimeter) platters, stored a meager 5 megabytes of data and took up more room than two refrigerators. Oh, and the cost? Just $50,000 ($421,147 in 2012 dollars). Since then, hard drives have grown smaller, more capacious and, thankfully, less expensive. For example, the Seagate Momentus laptop hard drive, with a form factor of just 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters), offers 750 gigabytes of storage for less than $100. But even with advanced protection technologies, the Momentus drive, like all HDDs, can crash and burn, taking precious data with it. That's because hard drives have mechanical parts that can fail. Drop a laptop, and the read-write heads can touch the spinning platters. This almost always results in severe data loss. Luckily, a new kind of computer drive could make crashes as obsolete as your Apple IIe. Known as a so...

How to Add a Hard Drive to Your Computer in 8 Steps - Do you own a computer that is more than a year old? If so, then you may be running out of disk space. In the same way that closets and attics have a way of filling up and overflowing, so do hard drives. Maybe your 8-megapixel camera needs a gigabyte of disk space every time you unload the camera's memory card. Or your MP3 collection grows by 10 songs every day. Perhaps you are trying to edit videos of the kids, and every 5 minutes of tape consumes a gigabyte of disk space. Or maybe you would like to add a TV tuner card to your machine and turn your computer into a DVR. Digital cameras, video cameras, MP3 players and TV tuner cards all consume lots of disk space. If you use any of these gadgets, chances are that you need more space. In this article, we will show you how easy it is to add a new hard drive to your existing machine. 1: Research your machine ­ Before we start the process of adding a drive, we need to do a s...

Should I move my hard disk to the cloud? - Whether you have a terabyte worth of vacation photos or a host of sensitive documents sitting on your computer, you want to keep your data safe, secure and accessible. A big part of achieving these goals is choosing where your data will live. Should you rely on your computer's hard drive? Is an external hard drive for backup purposes necessary? Or should you shift all your data to the cloud? Cloud storage has been making headlines for a few years now. The concept is pretty simple. You access the service through an Internet-connected device, pulling up whichever files you need at the time. Those files reside on servers that could potentially be thousands of miles or kilometers away. There are dozens of companies that offer some form of cloud storage. Some even allot users a certain amount of storage space for free. With all the competition in the market, customers can shop around for the deal that makes the most sense for them. All ...

How Floppy Disk Drives Work - If you have spent any time at all working with a computer, then chances are good that you have used a floppy disk at some point. The floppy disk drive (FDD) was the primary means of adding data to a computer until the CD-ROM drive became popular. In fact, FDDs have been a key component of most personal computers for more than 20 years. Basically, a floppy disk drive reads and writes data to a small, circular piece of metal-coated plastic similar to audio cassette tape. In this article, you will learn more about what is inside a floppy disk drive and how it works. You will also find out some cool facts about FDDs. History of the Floppy Disk Drive The floppy disk drive (FDD) was invented at IBM by Alan Shugart in 1967. The first floppy drives used an 8-inch disk (later called a "diskette" as it got smaller), which evolved into the 5.25-inch disk that was used on the first IBM Personal Computer in August 1981. The 5.25-inch disk held 360 k...

How does disk defrag work? - he word "disk defrag" is typically used to refer to the Microsoft Windows utility called Disk Defragmenter. It is designed to solve a problem that occurs because of the way hard disks store data. If you have read the article How Hard Disks Work, then you know three key facts about hard disks: Hard disks store data in chunks called sectors. If you imagine the surface of the disk divided into rings (like the rings of a tree), and then imagine dividing each ring into pie-slices, a sector is one pie-slice on one ring. Each sector holds a fixed amount of data, like 512 bytes. The hard disk has a small arm that can move from ring to ring on the surface of the disk. To reach a particular sector, the hard disk moves the arm to the right ring and waits for the sector to spin into position. Hard disks are slow in computer terms. Compared to the speed of the processor and its memory, the time it takes for the arm to move and for a sector to spin int...

How do I update the drivers on my computer? - It seems like a day doesn't go by where our computer isn't politely urging us to please install an update for something or other. While most of these allow us to explore new features in our music library or help software run with more security, there's also the need to update so your computer can run what you want, period. In a computer, a driver is a piece of software that tells hardware how to run on a certain operating system. That means your PC card, DVD drive, video card and other hardware all use drivers to make their operations work. If you're using your computer right now, you probably have a ton of drivers already installed and working. That's one of the reasons, in fact, that people don't know that much about drivers. Whenever Windows or Mac has an update, the drivers are generally installed along with it; you don't even realize you're getting a fancy new way for your hardware to communicate ...

How can I recover a deleted file from my computer recycling bin? - When Microsoft introduced the Recycle Bin in Windows 95, it immediately became a failsafe for many users. If you delete a file and realize that you actually need it, you can recover it easily by doing the following: Open the Recycle Bin by double-clicking on the Recycle Bin icon on your desktop (or you can go to the Recycle Bin folder in Windows Explorer). Find the file you want to recover and click to highlight it. Go to the File menu and choose the Restore option (or right click over the filename and select Restore from the context-sensitive menu). The file is now back on your computer in its original place. While the Recycle Bin is a great utility, there are times that a file is not placed in the Recycle Bin when you delete it. These include files from removable storage such as flash memory and Zip disks, files deleted from within some applications, and files deleted from the command prompt. Also, there are...

How big a hard drive do I need? - These days, hard drives aren't just getting larger because they can; they're also expanding because even casual technology users demand huge swaths of storage. Consider that we put our entire music collections on our computers, or downloaded television episodes. Every work or life document -- including (sometimes several) life histories' worth of photos -- is stored on our laptop or PC. It's no wonder, then, that Seagate just released a hard drive with 1 terabyte (yes, that's a trillion bytes) per square inch. Consider that a regular old MacBook Air laptop has 120 gigabytes of hard drive storage and you'll start to see how very impressive it is that Seagate's drive has the potential of a 60-terabyte capacity by the end of the decade. Companies like Seagate are offering increasingly larger capacity hard drives to consumers. But do you really need so much space? Courtesy Seagate But let's also remember that less ...

How to enable Apple's Handoff feature between your iOS devices and Mac - One of the key features of Continuity across Apple devices is Handoff. Handoff allows Apple's first-party apps and any third party developers to send an app's data seamlessly between devices so you can "pick up where you left off." For example, start composing an email message on your Mac in OS X Mail and a symbol will appear on your iPhone's lock screen to continue writing on the go. Open a webpage in Safari on your iPhone and a Safari icon will appear in your Mac's Dock to load the same webpage. Or start reading a story in the official AppleInsider app on your iPhone, and quickly continue on your iPad. Handoff works with Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Maps, Messages, Notes, Reminders, Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote as well as any enabled third party apps. Some examples of apps you can try with Handoff are Pocket, Wunderlist, and the NYTimes app. Of all the Continuity features, ...