Similarly, external hard drives are used with a USB connection, which is the same hard disk drive but safely inserted in a case to exist outside the computer case. However, flash drives have solid-state drives built-in and a USB connection is used to connect them with the computer. Similarly, there are different sizes of hard drives, varying from small to large.įor example, the most common flash drive has a hard drive, but there are no spinning disks in it like a traditional HDD. There is a different kind of hard drive and there are different ways to connect the drive to a computer except for SATA and PATA. These platters with magnetic heads that move with an actuator arm to read and write data to the drive. Unlike memory chips in SSD, the hard drive has rotating platters and each platter has several tracks and every track has several sectors. That said, you can still access the data if you restart a computer, which powers down the HDD and allows you to access everything inside the drive. The hard drive is non-volatile memory, means it can hold it’s a date in the absence of power while RAM (Non-volatile) memory doesn’t. The settings are different according to their manufacturer. Motherboard recognizes the drive with the jumper settings of the drive when there are multiple hard drives in the computer. Similarly, a power supply connections exist besides these ports. To connect the hard disk with motherboard there’s a port for a cable and you depending on the hard drive type you can connect SATA or PATA cables but they come with the hard drive. The hard drive is mounted in a way that its connections face inside the computer. For 5.25-inch drive bay, you can use an adapter for mounting. There are pre-drilled, threaded holes on the sides of a drive for easy mounting in the 3.5-inch drive bay in the computer case. Typically hard drives are heavier but not bigger than the size of a paperback book.

The common term HDD is used to refer hard disk drive, sometimes hard disk, hard drive, fixed drive, fixed disk, and fixed disk drive. For example, you will see in some computers where various hard drives are represented with multiple drive letters (e.g, C, D, and E) on a computer. This term has no technical meaning but has become common. 2 Popular Hard Disk Drive ManufacturersĪs Windows is Microsoft product so by default the hard drive is referred to as “C drive” which is taken as a primary partition on the primary hard drive in your PC.

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