Discover the 'mysterious' hard drive

Up to now, hard drive capacity has increased by an average of 50% per year. This milestone is marked with 1.5 terabyte HDD products manufactured by Seagate (USA). These components are extremely simple but sophisticated structures when the shell is opened.

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HDD is made up of two components. Outside is the logic board. Inside is a closed compartment containing disc components called HDA. Any dust that enters this chamber can destroy the disc surface because the rotation reaches a very high speed, averaging 5,400 rpm.

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Each HDD has 2 basic connectors. The first port for the power supply and the second port for data exchange with the computer. Particularly the second connector is also known as "interface". The most common interfaces include ATA and SATA.

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Although it appears later, SATA is becoming dominant. In addition, it is also worth mentioning that SCSI is the server interface.

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The ATA HDD standard board is made up of components such as Flash - ROM processing chips. This department stores the HDD software (firmware) that communicates with the computer, executes the read / write commands or monitors the operating mode of the HDD. Besides, there is RAM which is a utility that supports HDD operation optimally. If this capacity is 2MB then the hard drive also has 2MB of attached cache.

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Some manufacturers instead of designing SATA processors, simply add a conversion chip to turn the ATA interface into a more popular standard HDD.

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After peeling off the logic board, the HDA compartment reveals the motor rotation axis. This unit has direct contact both with the circuit board and internal components. The spindle now has speeds from 5,400 to 7,200 and 10,000 rpm depending on the type. The higher the motor speed, the faster the data exchange of the HDD with the computer.

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Inside the HDA may contain many thin disks called platters. This HDD model has 3 platter, each thin disk has a reader on the surface. Readers are attached to a machine arm, so they are always moved in the same coordinates.

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The movement mechanism of the machine arm is structured according to the principle of loudspeakers. There is an internal magnetic coil emitting magnetically provided by the magnet core. Thereby, the arm arm can be moved in the horizontal direction, inside or out depending on when the system operates.

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Above is an image of a six-reader mounted arm, but due to negligence when removing it, a reader has broken.