HARD DISK DRIVE GUIDE How a Hard Disk Drive Works

Hard Disk Assembly

The purpose of this article is to provide just the right balance of technical detail to convey a good insight into the innards of a hard disk drive and how if basically works without burdening the reader with excessive technical detail.

HARD DISK ASSEMBLY. A hard disk drive consists of a motor, spindle, platters, read/write heads, actuator, frame, air filter, and electronics. The frame mounts the mechanical parts of the drive and is sealed with a cover. The sealed part of the drive is known as the Hard Disk Assembly or HDA. The drive electronics usually consists of one or more printed circuit boards mounted on the bottom of the HDA. A head and platter can be visualized as being similar to a record and playback head on an old phonograph, except the data structure of a hard disk is arranged into concentric circles instead of in a spiral as it on a phonograph record (and CD-ROM). A hard disk has one or more platters and each platter usually has a head on each of its sides. The platters in modern drives are made from glass or ceramic to avoid the unfavorable thermal characteristics of the aluminum platters found in older drives. A layer of magnetic material is deposited/sputtered on the surface of the platters and those in most of the drives I've dissected have shiny, chrome-like surfaces. The platters are mounted on the spindle which is turned by the drive motor. Most current IDE hard disk drives spin at 5,400, 7,200, or 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM drives are emerging.

Here are the physical and logical parts of a hard drive.

A hard drive consists of a number of platters on a spindle. The platters are read and written to with heads for reading, writing, and aligning. Each platter has two sides. Each side is divided into a number of rings called tracks. The tracks are numbered 0 on the outside and usually go up to 1023 tracks. All the tracks on the platter form a cylinder. Cylinders are also usually numbered 0-1023. Each track is divided into sectors. Sectors are the smallest chunk of bytes usable on a hard drive. Sectors are usually 512 B but are always to the power of two. Contiguous tracks form clusters. A hard disk has one MBR (Master Boot Record). A MBR holds the Partition Table which says how a disk is partitioned into up to 4 primary partitions, or 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition A primary partition has a specific file system (e.g. FAT or NTFS) and may even have system file for a specific OS (e.g. W95 or WNT). A primary partition is assigned a logical hard drive letter. An extended partition is a contiguous portion of the hard drive that is not occupied by a primary partition. An extended partition is not formatted but it can be divided into multiple logical drives, each with its own letter, and those logical drives can be formatted. Space outside of these partitions are wasted and are not considered free space. If a drive does not need a primary partition than the whole thing can be an extended partition. Free space within an extended partition on one or more disks can be combined to form a volume set, i.e. a logical drive with its own letter.

A computer may have multiple hard drives. When additional hard drives are added to a machine, the assignment of logical drive letters follows particular rules.

The 1st primary partition on the 1st drive always has drive C:. The 1st drive will get the next letter(s) if it has additional primary partition(s). The additional drive(s) will get the next letters before any logical drives in extended partitions on the 1st drive if they have primary partitions; other wise, any logical drives in extended partitions on the 1st drive get the next letters before any logical drives in extended partitions on the additional drive(s) get assigned a letter