Hard Drive Technology Presentation

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What makes your hard drive work? This section looks at the physical makeup of your hard drive and how it works on your computer. We'll look at the recording surface of hard drives, how read/write heads store and retrieve data from your hard drive, and where your data is recorded on the disk surfaces. We'll also look briefly at the physical addressing techniques, so that you will understand what a cylinder, head, sector address means. Finally, We'll look at the timing elements (seek time, rotational delay time, and data transfer time) of your hard drive so you can understand the speed specifications of your drives. What are partitions on your hard drive? Once we learn how information is physically stored on your hard drive, we can start to learn how this information is logically organized on the drive. The highest level of organization on your hard drive are partitions. We will learn how partitions are created on your hard drive, the different types of partitions that you can have, and the limitations that each of these partitions types have. We'll also look at how these partitions are linked together by the Master Boot Record and the Partition Tables. Also, we will look at how the operating systems assign drive letters to each of your partitions. We'll look at single physical drive systems as well as multiple physical drive systems and how drive letters are assigned differently in each case. We'll also explorer how drive letters are assigned when multiple operating systems are involved. To conclude this section, we'll recommend some approaches to use in organizing your partitions such that the drive letters will be assigned in a neat and orderly fashion. How are files in a partition organized? The final step in understanding your hard drives is to identify the various operating systems that can use your hard drives and the files systems that they build in each partition. We will look at the most common file system (the FAT file system) and try to understand how it organizes your files in the partition. After this section, you'll have a better understanding of your directories or folders, how files are stored in the partition, and what fragmentation means. We'll also look at some of the limitations (the cluster problem, for example) of the FAT file system and how FAT32 can solved those problems. (Presentation Duration: 30-60 minutes)