What is a hard drive?
HDD (Hard Disk Drive), hard drive, screw, hard disk, hard - here is a small list of words by which it is called. This is a device that constantly records information and has a rewrite function.
It stores all information, including the operating system. It is on it that you install, write and overwrite all files on the computer.
How to see the hard drive?
If you enter My computer, then you will see local disks - this is the hard disk. More precisely, this is a little wrong. If you have one local drive, this may also mean that it is a hard drive. But if you have more than one local one, this does not mean at all that you have the same number of hard drives. The hard drive was simply divided into .
Well, externally the hard drive looks like this:
What types of hard drives are there?
They are primarily divided into External And Domestic.
External hard drive- This portable, portable hard drive, enclosed in a special box for easy transportation:
They differ in both volume and connection interface. If the first point is clear, then they have the same connection interface - USB. But now more and more are being released with the USB 3.0 interface, which is several times faster (claimed to be 10 times, but in reality less) than the outdated 2.0. 3.0 is distinguished by its blue connector.
Internal hard drive- this is the one that is on the computer. Everything is logical. Internal HDDs (hard drives) are divided into PCs (Personal Computers) and laptops.
The difference between them is mainly in size.
For a PC it is 3.55 inches, for a laptop it is 2.5 inches.
There is also 1.8, but more on that below.
Hard drive device.
Information in the hard drive is recorded on special magnetic disks. If you remove the cover by unscrewing the bolts, you will see the following picture:
These round pieces are magnetic disks on which information is located. It is read by a special spindle, which is located on top.
Nowadays they are increasingly producing railways using a different technology - using a circuit board. Such disks are more durable both in terms of operation and in the event of mechanical damage (after all, they have no moving elements) and have higher read and write speeds. Other advantages include: noiselessness, thermal properties, low energy consumption, weight and size. They have a name solid state SSD drives and have a form factor of 1.8 inches.
There are both internal:
and external ones:
Such disks (internal) are used to install the operating system on them. This is the right approach. From them it will load much faster, and all processes of copying, recording, installation and other work in general will also be faster compared to a regular hard drive.
Of the minuses, two main factors can be identified - the price (from $200 to $800) and the amount of memory. There are no terabyte SSDs available yet. And the price directly depends on the volume. Well, you don’t need much for the OS.
But now they are starting to release new versions of railways that have received all the best from others - this hybrid hard drives:
They allow you to perform operations just as quickly, but have a large amount of memory and a relatively low price (500 GB magnetic disk + 60 GB SSD flash memory = $350).
How can I find out what hard drive is installed on my computer?
Go to Device Manager and look.
RMB on My Computer - Properties - Device Manager
What are the characteristics of a hard drive? How to choose a hard drive?
When choosing a railway, you need to pay attention to the following indicators:
Interface- this is the connection and connectors. There are SATA and IDE. The former are more common, the latter are already becoming a thing of the past. SATA comes in different speeds: SATA I (up to 1.5 Gbit/s), SATA II (up to 3 Gbit/s), SATA III (up to 6 Gbit/s). When choosing, you need to know what connectors you have on your motherboard, so that there is no confusion later. You can read about this in the article.
Volume- how much memory will be contained in your disk. Here you should proceed from your preferences and look forward, because very often there is simply not enough memory and you have to delete something. I recommend reading the article that describes disk space. so that later they would not be surprised that they bought a 500 GB disk, but in fact it turned out to be 465 GB.
A good option would be to take 2-3 hard drives with a capacity of 500 GB. - 1 TB. Or one for 2 TB. , but here it should be taken into account that if it breaks, then not only the OS will fail, but also absolutely all the data on all local disks.
If you have several hard drives, this problem can be avoided.
Speed- gaining access to information. It is obtained by rotating its magnetic disks. This scale ranges from 4.5 thousand revolutions per minute to 10 thousand. The lower this figure, the less the disk will make noise, consume energy, generate heat, and reduce the speed of obtaining information. Usually they choose 5400 and 7200. These types of drives are still popular.
For storing information, you can choose 5400, and for the OS and programs - 7200.
Manufacturer- a company that produces railways. There is a lot of controversy here. I personally believe that any manufacturer has a defect rate. It’s just that some have more, and some have less. The most popular hard drive manufacturers to this day are Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi.
Today I will tell you how to find out the number of hard drives installed on our computer. This information will be useful to us when we talk about things like data backup.
As you know, there are often several volumes on a computer. For example, C and D. But in most cases, these are two logical drives on which the only physical drive installed on the computer is allocated.
But it also happens that there are several physical drives installed on the computer, each of which can be labeled with one letter or, in turn, can be divided into several local drives.
It would seem that it makes no difference whether it is a logical disk or a physical one. For the system, everything is the same.
For the system, of course, yes, but not for you and your hardware.
For example, you have a computer that has two disks - C and D (there may be much more of them, this is not significant). If you have one physical disk installed, partitioned into two logical volumes, then if the physical drive fails, all the logical volumes into which your disk is divided will become unavailable to you.
If volumes C and D are separate physical disks, then the failure of one volume does not damage the other.
So how can you determine the number of hard drives on your computer?
Everything is very simple. Click "Start" and right-click on "Computer". In the context menu that appears, select “Management”.
The following window will open:
Here you need to select the “Disk Management” section. The display will show information about the physical drives and the logical volumes to which they are allocated. The following illustration shows an example of one hard drive divided into two logical drives. There are also two hidden sections intended for system needs.
And here we see two hard drives at once:
Now you know how to determine the number of hard drives on your computer. If you are ready to move on, follow the publications.
The hard drive is one of the main components of a computer. After all, it is used to store most data, both user and system. In this article we will talk about how to find out what hard drive is on your computer and what its characteristics are.
Method No. 1. Disk properties.
The easiest way to find out what hard drive is on your computer is to use the built-in tools in the Windows operating system. To do this, open the “ ” window, right-click on any hard drive and select the “Properties” menu item.
After this, the “Disk Properties” window will open in front of you. Here, on the “Hardware” tab, there is a list of all drives connected to the computer.
Among other things, this list includes hard drives. The only downside is that the names of hard drives are presented in abbreviated form.
To get more information about your hard drive, simply enter its abbreviated name into any search engine. And you can easily find a page describing all its characteristics.
Method No. 2. HDDlife Professional program.
If you not only want to find out what hard drive is on your computer, but also get all the possible information about it, then you can use the HDDlife Professional program for this. This program is paid, but the Trial version is enough to view information about one hard drive.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the HDDlife program provides information about the hard drive model, hard drive manufacturer, technical condition of the hard drive, temperature, as well as logical drives.
The HDDlife Professional program can be downloaded. There you can also download the programs HDDlife for Notebooks (version for laptops) and SSD Life Professional (version for SSD drives).
Method number 3. CrystalDiskInfo program.
CrystalDiskInfo - can be considered a free alternative to the HDDlife Professional program. The CrystalDiskInfo program displays information about all hard drives on the computer. At the same time, for each hard drive, the model name, firmware version, serial number, interface used, volume letter, rotation speed, number of starts, total operating time, temperature, S.M.A.R.T. system data, and other information are displayed.
For SSD drives, CrystalDiskInfo may display some additional information. For example, the amount of data read and written over the entire operating time of the drive. You can download the program
Hard drive capacity is one of the critical parameters of a computer. Sometimes the time comes to replace storage media. The decisive characteristic for making such a decision is the size of the hard drive.
- To get a quick look at your PC's available storage capacity, open File Explorer and click This PC. Follow these steps:
- Press Win + E.
- A File Explorer window will open.
- Select "this PC" from the items listed on the left side of the window.
- You see an overview of all hard drives and their partitions used in this PC.
- PC Storage Review.
2. At a glance, you can determine the storage capacity of your PC. The blue part of the thermometer shows the part of the disk being used; the gray part represents the available space.
3. When the available space becomes too low, the thermometer turns red, which helps you quickly identify low capacity hard drives. You must respond to this situation in some way if you want to continue using the drive.
4. For more information about your hard drive partition, right-click the drive and select Properties. The Storage Properties dialog box appears. The General tab shows detailed information about the used and free space of the drive, as shown here.
5. When free space drops below 10 percent, Windows displays a free capacity warning. If you see this message, act immediately. Look for what part of your existing content you can safely delete or transfer to other media.
6. You can also find out the data we are interested in without starting the operating system. The necessary information is available in the BIOS. To find out, turn on the power of the computer, and during the startup process, hold down the key to enter the BIOS (this can be del, or F10, depending on the motherboard model). You will go to the menu. I use the arrow and Tab keys to navigate through the tabs and find the IDE menu. Select the hard drive you are interested in (there can only be one) and press the enter key. A window will open with the characteristics of the media, including its capacity.
7. In addition, you can use special diagnostic utilities that provide complete information about a particular type of equipment. For our task, something like HDD Life is suitable. After installing and launching the program, you will see a window with detailed information about the status, characteristics and condition of your hard drives.
Video: Find out the amount of RAM, video memory and hard drive size
When assembling a computer, you have to deal with a huge amount of information. The choice of components is influenced by many factors. But there are also elements that remain unchanged in any case. For example, it will not affect the choice of video card, motherboard and other PC parts.
But it can affect the operation of the system. This is due to the fact that insufficient memory leads to lags and failures of various processes. Therefore, it is important to know what capacity the hard drive has.
Device
A hard drive, or hard drive, is a device that stores information and provides random access to it. The hard drive is based on magnetic recording. At the moment it is the main drive in consumer systems. Although they are actively starting to be replaced with faster devices - SSDs.
Characteristics
The capacity of a hard drive is one of its characteristics. It describes the amount of data that can be stored on a particular device. In addition to this parameter, hard drives are characterized by their interface - the conditional technical interaction of two devices. Modern models have received many interface modifications, so it is important to pay attention to this point when choosing.
Further, hard drives differ in physical size. Although it is unfair to say this at the moment, since from a certain point most manufacturers adhere to the standardized form factor of 3.5 inches for desktop PCs and 2.5 for laptops. The characteristics include spindle rotation, random access time, number of operations and energy consumption.
Capacity
Now let's move directly to the hard drive capacity. It is not difficult to guess that a lot of time has passed since the advent of the first railways. Accordingly, this figure grew exponentially. Now you can find drives with any capacity up to 10 TB, if we talk about the 3.5 form factor. It is also important to remember that disks always have a capacity that is a multiple of 1024. Although the manufacturers themselves always indicate parameters that are multiples of 1000. If you see that the drive has 200 GB, in fact its capacity is 186.2 GB.
Connected
Of course, if you bought your own hard drive, you most likely know its capacity. It is indicated in the store, on the packaging, and even on a sticker on top of the device itself. In this case, you can only double-check the hard drive capacity. Those who ordered equipment from third-party resources may also need to understand this issue. For example, Chinese online stores have long been famous for changing parameters. Thus, customers receive devices from the wrong company or with the wrong characteristics. This may require a similar capacitance analysis.
So, the equipment can be installed in the case and its characteristics can be viewed through the system. To do this, click on the “My Computer” icon. A new window opens. There will be one or more disks in front of us. You should not take into account only the drive and flash drive, if installed.
Usually, when installing a railway system, it is divided into several parts. The entire system is placed on drive C. It is recommended not to install anything else here. Drives D, E, and so on contain the user’s personal data. The total amount of their volume is the capacity of the railway. To fold it, you need to right-click on each disk, and then go to “Properties”. A new window will appear in which you will see a chart as well as numerical values. It shows how much is free and occupied, as well as the total volume. When calculating, do not forget to make allowances for the fact that the manufacturer indicates “beautiful” numbers. But instead of 500 GB, you will only have 452 GB.
Unconnected
There is a possibility that you just bought or were given a hard drive. Before connecting it, you can check the capacity. But for this you will need a special box. This is because not all devices have a USB interface. To check, we need to connect the hard drive through this connector. After you connect the hard drive to the system, you can check it using the method described above.
Programs
Perhaps for some reason the system check method through “My Computer” is not suitable for you. In this case, a third-party program can help. For example, AIDA64 Extreme Edition. It is enough to download it and install it on the hard drive being tested.
After launch, the software will scan the system. By the way, it shows not only information on the hard drive, but also on all other components. Therefore, after scanning you will have to find specifically the hard drive parameters. Then go to the “Data Storage” section, and then - “Total Size”. Here you can find out about the drive model and other useful information.
Record breakers
When purchasing, it is better to know the maximum information capacity of the hard drive. Of course, you are unlikely to need the largest hard drive, but it’s worth at least understanding the scale of development of this device. So, the oldest capacity used was an 8 MB drive. Nowadays, a photo from some smartphones won’t even fit there. The most popular nowadays are HDDs starting from 500 GB. Although some older laptop models also have variations with 128 GB, etc.
It is known that a large hard drive capacity has virtually no effect on system performance. Sometimes you may not find space for your data and files as your PC may not be able to handle the volume. It will require more memory for temporary system files. From here, noticeable “brakes” of the system will appear.
The most capacious at the moment is a giant 10 TB drive. Such a disk can cost about 25 thousand rubles. But it will definitely be a lot for the average user. There is also a 6 TB model. Its price is slightly lower - 14 thousand rubles. It is very good that manufacturers, in addition to increasing capacity, also care about good speed, wear resistance and quality of materials.