What is Hard Drive
The Hard Drive is a semi permanent storage area that acts like Memory, except it is slower and far larger. The hard drive is a rectangular metallic box inside which is a stack of round platters and a read/write head. The hard drive plugs into the motherboard’s IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) Controller, SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) Controller or SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) Controller depending on the drive type and the motherboard type. Whenever the PC requires information, it must first be read from the hard drive, usually into RAM, from where it is then accessed by the CPU and other devices.
Data such as installed software will remain on the hard drive regardless of whether the system is rebooted or switched off. Because the hard drive involves moving physical components, such as the read/write head and a spinning disk, it can never be as fast as RAM/ROM – which have no moving parts in providing information. Often a system may slow down or stutter while waiting for more information to be loaded up or written to the hard drive. The amount of information on the hard drive itself usually has no significant impact on its performance. In human body terms, the hard drive and the information it holds is like a library of books, or a notepad that can be read from and written to.