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Sunday, April 18, 2010

Hard Disk Drive


Hard disk drives records data by magnetizing ferromagnetic material directionally, to represent either a 0 or a 1 binary digit. They read the data back by detecting the magnetization of the material. A typical hard disk drive consists of a spindle that holds one or more flat circular disks called platters. The data are recorded onto the platters. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, standard copy paper is 0.07–0.18 millimeters (70,000–180,000 nm) with an outer layer of carbon for protection. Older disks used iron(III) oxide as the magnetic material, but current disks use a cobalt-based alloy.

The platters are spun at very high speeds. Information is written to a platter as it rotates past devices called read-and-write heads that operate very close (tens of nanometers in new drives) over the magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetization of the material immediately under it. There is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm (or access arm) moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins. The arm is moved using a voice coil or in some older designs a stepper motor.

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