pctechguide.com

  • Home
  • Guides
  • Tutorials
  • Articles
  • Reviews
  • Glossary
  • Contact

Hard Disks

When the power to a PC is switched off, the contents of memory are lost. It is the PC’s hard disk that serves as a non-volatile, bulk storage medium and as the repository for a user’s documents, files and applications. It’s astonishing to recall that back in 1954, when IBM first invented the hard disk, capacity was a mere 5MB stored across fifty 24in platters. 25 years later Seagate Technology introduced the first hard disk drive for personal computers, boasting a capacity of up to 40MB and data transfer rate of 625 KBps using the MFM encoding method. A later version of the company’s ST506 interface increased both capacity and speed and switched to the RLL encoding method. It’s equally hard to believe that as recently as the late 1980s 100MB of hard disk space was considered generous. Today, this would be totally inadequate, hardly enough to install the operating system alone, let alone a huge application such as Microsoft Office.

The PC’s upgrade-ability has led software companies to believe that it doesn’t matter how large their applications are. As a result, the average size of the hard disk rose from 100MB to 1.2GB in just a few years and by the start of the new millennium a typical desktop hard drive stored 18GB across three 3.5in platters. Thankfully, as capacity has gone up prices have come down, improved areal density levels being the dominant reason for the reduction in price per megabyte.

It’s not just the size of hard disks that has increased. The performance of fixed disk media has also evolved considerably. When the Intel Triton chipset arrived, EIDE PIO mode 4 was born and hard disk performance soared to new heights, allowing users to experience high-performance and high-capacity data storage without having to pay a premium for a SCSI-based system.

  • Hard disk (hard drive) construction
  • Hard Disk (hard drive) Operation
  • Hard disk (hard drive) format – the tracks and sectors of the hard disk
  • File systems (FAT, FAT8, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS) explained
  • Hard Disk (Hard Drive) Performance – transfer rates, latency and seek times
  • Hard Disk AV Capability
  • Hard Disk Capacity
  • Hard Disk Capacity Barriers
  • Hard Disk MR Technology
  • Hard Disk GMR Technology
  • Hard Disk Pixie Dust
  • Hard Disk Longitudinal Recording
  • Hard Disk Perpendicular Recording
  • RAID – Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks
  • Hard Disk SMART Drives
  • Hard Disk MicroDrives
  • Hard Disk OAW Technology
  • Hard Disk PLEDM
  • Hard Disk Millipede
  • Guide to Western Digital’s GreenPower hard drive technology
  • Solid state hard drive (SSD) technology guide

Great Resource For File Recovery Service:  salvagedata

PC Components | Processors (CPUs) | PC Data Storage | PC Multimedia | PC Input/Output | Communications | Mobile Computing

Gaming Laptop Security Guide: Protecting Your High-End Hardware Investment in 2025

Since Jacob took over PC Tech Guide, we’ve looked at how tech intersects with personal well-being and digital safety. Gaming laptops are now … [Read More...]

20 Cool Creative Commons Photographs About the Future of AI

AI technology is starting to have a huge impact on our lives. The market value for AI is estimated to have been worth $279.22 billion in 2024 and it … [Read More...]

13 Impressive Stats on the Future of AI

AI technology is starting to become much more important in our everyday lives. Many businesses are using it as well. While he has created a lot of … [Read More...]

Graphic Designers on Reddit Share their Views of AI

There are clearly a lot of positive things about AI. However, it is not a good thing for everyone. One of the things that many people are worried … [Read More...]

Redditors Talk About the Impact of AI on Freelance Writers

AI technology has had a huge impact on our lives. A 2023 survey by Pew Research found that 56% of people use AI at least once a day or once a week. … [Read More...]

11 Most Popular Books on Perl Programming

Perl is not the most popular programming language. It has only one million users, compared to 12 million that use Python. However, it has a lot of … [Read More...]

Guides

  • Computer Communications
  • Mobile Computing
  • PC Components
  • PC Data Storage
  • PC Input-Output
  • PC Multimedia
  • Processors (CPUs)

Recent Posts

WAN

WAN Definition: Wide Area Network: a geographically dispersed network formed by linking several computers or local area networks (LANs) together over … [Read More...]

Protect Business From Cyber Attacks

A company is only as safe as its computer network and, though it's hard to admit, many businesses are frightfully unprotected when it comes to … [Read More...]

Multi-Name Rogue 2014 – Antivirus Protection 2014

Summer is over and that means it's time for the FAKE antivirus clients to start rolling out.  Yes,  I bet you did not know that as it starts to get … [Read More...]

[footer_backtotop]

Copyright © 2025 About | Privacy | Contact Information | Wrtie For Us | Disclaimer | Copyright License | Authors