How Internal and External HDDs work

HDDs. Already mentioned in a couple of previous posts. The hard drive is one of the most important pieces of a computer that is considered to be main storage for the system. Not many know that there are two types of hard drives.

One hard drive that most know about is the internal one. Internal is harbored inside the computer. This type of HDD will most likely have a operating system contained within it. Operating systems will be covered in another post. Anyway, with the internal HDD many different intangable objects can be stored within it for later use. Storing files such as documents, music, photos, presentations, movies etc. can be stored here. This capability will free you from having to keep ample external disks on hand. Although the HDD can hold huge amount of files, having a back up is not a bad idea. Which external HDDs will come into play.

External HDD are like those of internal HDDs. These can be used as a backup for the internals. The externals are much more portable than those of the internal. Here a computer user can bring his/her HDD to other computers and plug them in like thumb/flash drives. One difference between the internal and external is that the external can't really support a operating system. (Most computers won't recognize the operating system once it is plugged into the usb drive.) The main use for externals are for users to tote around mass amounts of information place to place without having multiple disks i.e. floppy disks.

Now I know many people wonder how do these HDDs work? Well no need to fear this nerd is here! What really happens on the inside of these HDDs are many different plates that spin fast, some from 5,400 RPM to 10,000. This allows for fast access to the information. These plates are magnetic just like 3.5" floppy disks, but look like CDs. In between these plates are read and write heads which do like they say, the read heads read the information that is on the disk and the write heads write information that you want to store onto it. There in a very small nutshell is how a HDD works.