Chapter 7
Chapter 7: Easing In to Hard Disks ...............................................................................
In This Chapter
Understanding a hard drive
Going inside a hard drive
Dealing with a good disk gone bad
Installing a new drive in an old body
Plugging in an external drive
M
ost of the glamour goes to the body, and sometimes there’s some
credit for having a brain. What I mean is that though a laptop’s physi-
cal design and microprocessor are essential components, not an awful lot of
work is going to be accomplished without a capable hard drive. Like come-
dian George Carlin once famously observed about the real reason we have
houses and apartments: We need a place to keep our stuff.The hard drive is the home of your booty, your treasure. It holds the operating
system that brings the laptop to life, the applications that give it a purpose,
and the words, pictures, and music you have created.Diving in to a Hard Drive .............................................................................
A hard driveis, at its heart, a very large, very fast revolving storage closet.
Information is recorded in the form of electrical marks inscribed by one or
more electromagnets that move in and out to reach the magnetically marked
tracks of the spinning disk.Although a hard drive (aka hard disk drive) is in many ways similar to a
floppy disk drive in concept, it has several major differences:Many drives have several rigid platters rather than a single floppy disk.
To go along with the multiple platters, the drive has an equivalent
number of read/write heads — one for each side of the platter.