No matter what kind of computer you are using right now, one thing is sure – it does have a hard drive, a quintessential component in every computer. A hard drive is like a brain to a computer – without it, the machine suddenly loses all its ‘cleverness’, because the hard drive is that magic piece of hardware that stores all the important data – from software and files to our operating systems. Even if you are not really into computers, you surely know how important hard drive is! Here we have gathered a few curious facts that we bet you didn’t know till now about this vital piece of computing equipment:
The very first hard drive in history, called the 350 Disk Storage Unit, was made by IBM, and it was released in… would you guess when? In 1956! Its capacity was 5 MB, and it cost, an impressive sum of money for those times. In terms of dimensions, the device was a far cry from what we are used to now – it was approximately the size of a large refrigerator and weighed more than a ton. Not something you can just purchase in your local hardware store and bring home, right? Over the years the size of hard drive decreased significantly, whereas its storage capacity dramatically increased!
At the same time, one could argue that not much has changed. Modern hard drives are in many ways very similar to that very first IBM hard drive: they still have platters that spin and a head attached to an arm for writing and reading data, so their structure has basically remained unchanged. Hard drives generate heat when they work, and sometimes they also produce noise. This usually means that something is not going very well – it is normal to hear a soft noise that the fans of your computer emanate, but irregular, louder noises are probably from your struggling hard drive…
If you think that you can wipe your hard drive clean, think again. Whenever data is deleted from the HDD, usually only the index pointers are cleared. The actual data is still stored in the internal memory and can be recuperated. The deleted data will be really gone only if the data memory is rewritten, and it’s extremely complicated, if not impossible, to do it by yourself. There is, however, drive wipe software, like Remo Drive Wipe, that can prevent the restoration of your deleted data if you have definitely decided to delete it forever.
There is a wide choice of hard drives in the market nowadays – there are nearly 200 hard drive manufacturing companies in the world! Just have a quick look at the range of hard drives in any store that sells them, such as an online retailer https://pigu.lt/lt/, and you will be overwhelmed by choice. However, lots of smaller companies are going out of business and hard drive production increasingly seems to be concentrated in the hands of a few major players. And these manufacturers are thinking what to do next because it appears that the technology is reaching its physical limits. Many argue that SSDs are the future, and HDDs are on their way out. Let’s wait and see what happens next…
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