How Hard Drives Work

Whether it’s expanding your Steam or Epic library, installing new software or running virtual machines – realising that you need more storage than your existing drive can handle is always frustrating. Upgrading to a bigger hard drive will not only free up space for your files and applications but also give you better performance by increasing read/write speeds.

Hard disk drives are magnetic devices that store data on platters in concentric circles called tracks, which are further divided into sectors. To read data, a hard drive’s actuator arm moves across the surface of the disks and detects the presence or absence of a charge in each sector. This information is then sent back to the computer system.

When a user requests data from the computer, the drive’s I/O controller tells the hard disk drive’s actuator arm where to find it. The head then scans each sector of the platter for that data and changes its magnetism accordingly. The actuator arm also moves around the platters when the hard drive is active, erasing and rewriting data as needed.

In order to increase the storage capacity of a hard disk drive, manufacturers use different recording technologies. For example, the Toshiba IronWolf Pro uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR), where tracks overlap like shingles on a roof, to achieve a higher density and improve performance by speeding up access times. HGST’s first helium-filled hard disk drive uses the same technology to improve efficiency and reduce power consumption, and is available at capacities up to 10TB. Hard drives

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