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The Hard Disk

In the beginning...

I bet most of you don't even remember what it was like without a hard drive! You probably take it all for granted. It's a sad state of affairs: I'm 24 years old (at the time of writing this), and already I'm talking about how tough the IT world was 'when I was a lad'. When I had a tape drive on an old Acorn, it took several minutes just to display a few crude pixels on the screen. I moved on to use a Sinclair Spectrum +3, which had a 3-inch floppy disk drive. At the time, I thought that was the best thing since sliced bread.

But one of the best machines I ever owned was my Commodore Amiga 500. You could do incredible things with it, but it was definitely a pain to use with only floppy drives. Even with two floppy drives, there seemed to be an infinite amount of disk swapping before you could get to the Workbench screen (the equivalent of the Windows GUI) and do anything productive. Finally I bought a second-hand 20 megabyte hard disk for my Amiga for about two hundred pounds, and that was when I realised what a computer was really capable of. No more disk swapping; no more 'I'll just go and make a cup of coffee while I load this tiny file'. No more storage problems. It's kind of like comparing a Ferrari to a rusty bicycle.

Only now we don't work with 20MB Ferraris... we all work with our own personal 100 gigabyte Boeing 747s. (Apologies for the awful analogies.)

Move on to look at the mechanics of a hard disk.