The secondary storage, better known as hard drive is an essential hardware of thecomputer. The way mitochondria of a cell is called powerhouse, similarly hard drive is called data house of the computer. It is a disc, which store magnetic data. The ability of a hard drive is dependent on the amount of data it stores and the process of hard drive recovery. It is non-volatile storage device, it maintains its data even when there is no power. The capacity of these drives is in terms of MB (Mega Bytes), GB (Giga Bytes) and TB (Tera Bytes). The amount of time it takes to access data defines its capability. The data transfer rate generally measured in Mbits/sec is a performance characteristic of hard drive. Its quality is also determined by the seek time and delay (latency) involved in execution of commands by the user.
The hard drive are used in desktops, laptops, smart mobile phones, tablets or phablets and the enterprise computers. A hard disk drive of a desktop may have storage space ranging from 2 GB to 60 GB and that of a phone can have from 256 MB to 2GB. In market there are multiple brands of hard disk available. The main market lies in the hands of Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. With the advent of technology the form factors of the hard drives have also revolutionized from 8 inch to 0.85 inches.
The very basic and primary function of the hard disk is to boot up the computer. The hard disk stores the operating system. Only with the help of hard disks the computer can maintain, retain and preserve the information. These could be used as both the external device and the internal device. The reason behind this approach are the size limitations. The partitioning method is used to organize the data or the information stored in the hard disk. The disk can be easily portioned while formatting. Make as many as partitions, you with amount of space you need. It is strongly recommended to make a dedicated partition for program files and the operating system. The plus point is that it decreases the risk quotient of loss of the data. The corrupt file may affect the partition where it is saved, not the other partitions. It also gives an added adaptability of making back-ups of the data. Back-ups are very helpful in hard drive recovery.
There is no second opinion about the importance of hard disk in our computer and our own life. It is a crucial device used to store large sized files. These files could be songs, videos, images, documents, presentations, applications, and software, anything you want to store in your system. The operating system supports the ability to compress the drive to save space. There also an option of defragmentation. It is defined as procedure to unite fragmented files, scattered over the disk. The fragmented files occupy large storage space. It is the arrangement of data and files in more efficient way.
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