A hard drive or hard disk drive is a magnetic storage device installed inside a computer and used as a permanent storage for data. Hard drives have drive motors designed to spin magnetic platters and drive the heads and these are enclosed within a protective casing. The hard drive usually contains the operating system and applications and is often configured as the first drive in the boot sequence. In order to increase your computer’s storage capacity you can install multiple hard disks.

In order to communicate with the computer the hard drive requires an interface and the commonly used ones are Integrated Drive Electronics and Small Computer System Interface. Other interfaces are Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics, Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. These interfaces are differentiated by the number of pins they have on their connectors. [Read More]