Hard disk drive is a magnetic storage medium in a computer. It is a storage device device used to store the data permanently and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage medium and one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material.

Data are stored as  a digit (1 or 0) by magnetising tiny spots on the spinning disk in several directions and reads data in digit by detecting the direction of magnetization in the spots.

Hard disks owned computers can store terabytes (trillions of bytes) of data . It is also called by the name HDD ,hard drive, hard disk, magnetic hard drive and fixed disk drive.

Physical Description

 A hard drive is small size of a book and it is much heavier.

The sides of the drive have threaded holes for simple mounting within the 3.5-inch drive bay in the computer case. Mounting is additionally possible in a smaller 2.5-inch drive and bigger 5.25-inch drive bay with an adapter. The disk drive is mounted, that the end with the connections faces inside the pc. Laptops often use a 2.5-inch hard disk drive or SSD. It is completely covered in a metal case to protect the disks from dust entering through it.

Advantages of Hard disk drive :

  • Availability 

    It is abundantly available for both external and internal in the market. the users who are looking to upgrade their PC can easily find a hard disk drive but purchasing a Solid-state drive is costly.
  • Cost 

    A hard drive tends to be less in price compared to Solid state drive. It is not costly to set it up in a computer than SSD because the production cost for is significantly lower.
  •  Storage capacity 

    we can store it gives a various larger option for HHD users. And also, the base capacity of an HDD is usually higher than an SSD. The standard capacity that almost all users prefer has found to be 500GB. nowadays external hard drives with 6TB of space for storing is comparatively easy to seek out within the market.
  •  Lifespan 

     Unlike an SSD there’s no flash memories involved in HDDs the info written on a tough disk drive is directly written on the platter disks which normally does not wear out.
  •  Non-Volatile 

    A hard drive uses electoro-magnetic platters build in disks for storing information. volatile memory devices present on your computer tends to loses its data once it is running out of power but it will not in hard disk drive.

Disadvantages of Hard Disk Drive :

  • The speed of the disk which leads to slow down the system. The speed of a hard drive depends upon its Revolutions Per Minute (RPM).
  • We know that the hard drive is made of mechanical pard due to overhead which leads to mechanical failures sometimes shutdown of the system.
  • Due to the constant rotation of the platter disks and the movement of read/write head there is a distracting noise produced by the hard drive and also starts vibrating