Our hard drive cadaver, though, is an older version but this only affects a single pin in the power connection. The specification of the format has gone through lots of revisions since then and we're currently on version 3.4.

Serial ATA first appeared in 2000, and in desktop PCs, it's the standard system used to connect drives to the rest of the computer. The one at the top of the board is for the motor that spins the disks, whereas the bottom three are, from left to right, jumper pins to allow the drive to be configured for certain setups, SATA (Serial ATA) data, and SATA power. Even tiny 1.8' HDDs use metal for the body, although they tend to be made from aluminum, rather than steel, as they're designed to be as light as possible.įlipping the drive over, we can see a circuit board and a bunch of connections. The forces inside the device, when under heavy usage, can be pretty serious, so the use of thick metal stops the body from flexing and vibrating. The bulk of the hard drive is cast metal. This one is dead, too, so in truth this is more of an autopsy, rather than an anatomy lesson. We're going to take apart something that's not quite that size, but still pretty decent today: a 3.5' Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD, specifically the ST3000DM001 model, infamous for it's high failure rate and subsequent lawsuits. What has changed, and hugely so, is the amount of data that can be stored on them.īack in 1987, you could buy a 20 MB HDD for around $350 today that kind of money will get you 14 TB of storage: 700,000 times more space. There are still disks, that use magnetism to store data, and there are devices to read/write that data.

And generally speaking, the overall structure hasn't changed a great deal in that time. IBM released the first commercially available HDD in 1956, all 3.75 MB of it. The mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) has been the standard storage system for PCs across the world for over 30 years, but the technology behind it all is much older than that.

Let's start our look into the guts of storage drives with ones that use magnetism to store digital data.

But how well do you know the components that make up a PC? You might use one to work out tax returns or play the latest games you might even be into building and tweaking computers. You might have a desktop PC at work, school, or home. TechSpot's Anatomy of Computer Hardware Series

Infamous first light disk