A Look Into the Laptop Hard Drive

Hard Drive History

Who would have thought that a one ton device, with rotating plates twenty inches in diameter would begin an age littered with PDA's, laptop computers, and mobile music devices? Introduced fifty years ago on September 13, 1956 by IBM, the hard drive paved the way for future advancements in technology. It was the first technological instrument that incorporated storage capabilities that were easily retrievable. Before the hard drive people used paper tape, which used punched holes on a thin piece of paper in order to store information. This method made the potential for data loss astronomical. Another method used before the hard drive was the data cassette recording method, which recorded information in the same way that a cassette recorder records songs. With such methods for storing information it is of little wonder why tech companies engineered the hard drive.  More reliable methods of storing information was integral, especially in the dawn of the technology boom of the twenty-first century.

Originally, the hard drive contained fifty rotating disks and held five megabytes of memory. Five megabytes may not sound like much, but in 1956 it was more than enough space. Currently, a single digital camera photo file can take up as much as 5 megabytes of memory or more. What made IBM's hard drive revolutionary was the way it retrieved information, called the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC). The RAMAC made it possible to retrieve information directly from where it was stored in a fraction of the time it took other methods.

How Laptop Hard Drives Work

Currently hard drives are much smaller than IBM's first hard drive, but they work in the same basic manner. A hard drive is simply a place to store information such as a picture, a music file, a computer program file, etc. The hard drive stores information either permanently or until the information is erased. The amount a hard drive stores varies. There are drives that hold 10 megabytes of memory and some that store as much as 700 megabytes. 

There are four basic parts to every hard drive, whether it is a computer hard drive or a laptop hard drive. Hard drives have a chassis, platters (the number of platters varies depending on the capacity of the hard drive), head arm, and head actuator. Information is stored on the platters using magnetic recording technology, which is similar to how a cassette player records a song. Unlike a cassette player, the head arm retrieves information without actually touching the platters and stores information as small files. In the hard drive, the head arm flies over the platter(s), which allow it to move from one point on the platter to another almost instantly. The way the head arm retrieves a file is the RAMAC. This method of retrieval makes it possible for you to get to your file immediately. When you look at the specifications of a hard drive, you will encounter the RAMAC as the seek time.  The faster the seek time, the faster the hard drive will find and load your file.