What is the hard disk? A hard drive, solid state hard drive, disk drive, or compact disk is a computer-based electro-mechanic data storage device that stores and retrieves data electronically using spin currents and one or more spinning platters covered with sensitive magnetic material. They can be built into or purchased as stand alone units. They have speed and storage capacity equal to or greater than traditional computer hard drives and are increasingly used by desktop and notebook PCs.
There are several types of hard disks available. The most common and familiar are the CD disk, DVD disk, and Blu-ray disc. Hard drives can also be built into personal computers in addition to the previously mentioned alternatives. There are several manufacturers of hard drives: Western Digital, WD, IBM, SanDisk, Crucial, etc.
SSD (self-referenced SSD) stands for small form factor disk. These hard drives are generally smaller than their traditional brothers and have increased storage space relative to their physical size. These have become very popular in recent years as they offer many benefits including speedy data access speeds, higher capacities, and extended warranties.
HDD (hard disk drive) is a logical partitioned area on the disk which may consist of one or more partitions. Partitions are logical units of stored information on the hard disk. Each partition can have a file system, dos file, boot manager, operating system, and so forth. Most Linux distributions come standard with grub 1.0 and there are free and open source versions of grub.
In the Linux/Unix platform, Linux systems use /dev/hdda in order to boot up. Windows machines use cfdisk, which is not the same as grub. /dev/hdda is formatted like a normal partition and all files will be saved to the disk in a Normal partition. Windows PCs uses “FAT” partitions, which is not the same as the Linux /dev/hdda distinction.
The differences between Linux and Windows OS include the installation of software and the structure of the operating system. Windows can boot from both Linux and Windows CD-ROMs but cannot install from them. If you install your Windows OS into Windows, it will install directly into the disk based on where the Windows boot files are located. If you install a Linux system onto a Linux based PC, then it will boot from either a Live CD (Live CD being the most popular), a DVD-ROM, or an OS X bootable disk. Linux can boot directly from its own partitions (though this depends on the operating system) while Windows works very partially through other programs and then boots directly from these other programs. Windows can boot directly from one of its many physical drives but the Linux virtual drives have much greater bandwidth and space.
Windows virtual drives work much like an actual hard drive and there is considerable data actually on them. There are logical partitions on the OS that allow it to work as though it has multiple hard drives on it and so if more than one drive is required then it is possible to have more than one in the physical configuration. Windows operating systems use a “HDD” (hard drive) in order to save its settings and other vital information to diskettes so that they can be recovered if something goes wrong. One of the physical drives on a Windows machine is known as the “HDD”, and this has two sectors (fields of data storage) known as the Physical Sector Addressablity (also known as the PASector).
When using a USB port for hard disk drives in your Windows machine then the drive must be formatted with NTFS. In order to do this you open your computer’s system drive and then right click on the “My Computer” icon which is positioned on the desktop. You then select “ipalign” then enter. This will make sure that the drive is lined up correctly with the rest of the existing drives and that it aligns itself correctly when plugged into the USB port. This is usually done automatically by the computer, but you may have to do it for some models.