Motherboard

A motherboard is the main and the central printed circuit board (PCB) in the modern computers and holds many of the crucial components of the computer system, and provides connectors for other peripheral devices. The motherboard is also known as the main board, system board or the logic board (on Apple computers).It is also sometimes casually shortened to mobo.

Today most of the computer motherboards are designed for IBM-compatible computers, which are currently account for around 90% of global PC sales. A motherboard, like a backplane, provides the electrical connections by which the other components of the system communicate, but unlike a backplane, it also connects the central processing unit and hosts other subsystems and devices.

A typical desktop computer has its microprocessor, main memory, and other essential components connected to the motherboard. Other components such as external storage devices, controllers for video display and sound, and peripheral devices may be attached to the motherboard as plug-in cards or via cables, although in modern computers it is increasingly common to integrate some of these peripheral into the motherboard itself.

An important components of a motherboard is the microprocessor's supporting chipset, which provides the supporting interfaces between the CPU and the various buses and external components. This chipset determines, to an extent, the features and capabilities of the motherboard

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.