HARD+DRIVE

HARD DRIVE The Hard Drive is a large, semi‐permanent storage area that acts like Memory, except it is slower and typically 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 physical components, such as the moving read/write head and a spinning disk, it cannot be as fast as RAM – which has 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 an external library of books, or a notepad that can be read from and written to. CD/DVD/CDRW/DVD‐R DRIVE

Much like the Hard Drive, a CD, DVD, CDRW or DVD‐R drive is a storage device that reads from and sometimes writes information onto CDs or DVDs that permanently hold this information until overwritten or deleted. Such drives usually come in plastic rectangular boxes with a loading slot or extendable tray in the front. They usually plug into the motherboard’s IDE Controller or SATA Controller depending on the drive and motherboard type.

Specifically, CD and DVD ROM drives can read information from CDs or CDs & DVDs respectively, but cannot write anything onto them. CDRW and DVD‐R drives can both read from and write information to writeable CDs and CDs & DVDs respectively. All these drives are slower than a hard drive in reading and writing information due to physical limitations once again and also the way in which they are connected to the main system Bus. In human body terms, these drives are again much like an external library and the CDs and DVDs themselves are books or notepads.  