UniCV/DECM – Departamento de Engenharia e Ciências do Mar

Understanding Hard Disk

Hard disk drives where introduced in 1956 as data storage for an IBM
accounting computer.
A hard disk (HD) drive is a digital data storage device that writes and reads
data via magnetization changes of a magnetic storage disk along concentric
tracks.
To maintain your HD healthy you have to deal with it with extreme care.
Contaminates on the heads or the disk surface can cause head-crash. Head
crashes can be caused by electronic failure, a sudden power failure, physical
shock, wear and tear, corrosion, or poorly manufactured platters and heads.
Hard drives are assembled in clean rooms (cleaner than surgery rooms) and
then sealed.

Connectors

Hard disk drives have basically two connectors, one for power and other for
exchanging data with the computer. This second connector is better known
as “interface”.
The master/slave jumper on ATA hard drives can be configured in three
different ways:
• Master: this means that this drive will be the only one attached to the
cable that connects the hard drive to the computer or will be the first
drive in a two-drive configuration.
• Slave: this means that this drive will be the second drive attached to
the cable that connects the hard drive to the computer.
• CS (Cable Select): this means that you will use a “special” cable
(called CS cable) that the configuration of whether a drive will be
master or slave will be made by the position of the hard drive on the
cable and not by a jumper configuration on the drive.

Hard disk interfaces

Hard disks also come in several flavors such as IDE (actually ATA), SCSI and
SATA, as do optical drives. ATA is the most common interface used today.
SCSI disks can usually be found on servers.

IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics, more commonly called by its acronym

IDE, is an interface for hard drives. IDE is a marketing term; the real
standard is called ATA.

EIDE - Enhanced IDE or ATA-2 was later developed and increased transfer
speed, added 32-bit transactions and DMA support.

ATA - Stands for Advanced Technology Attachment. The ATA -term is

commonly used interchangeably with IDE. The older and more common
parallel ATA (P-ATA) is currently being replaced by serial ATA (SATA).

SCSI - Small Computer System Interface. Pronounced "scuzzy". It's a

specification for a hardware interface for connecting devices such as hard
disks and scanners to a computer.

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Most PCs have an ATA (IDE) bus instead of SCSI for connecting internal hard
disks. SCSI is seen more often in servers, as it tends to be faster and more
reliable (though more expensive). Another advantage of SCSI controller is
that it requires only one IRQ and can handle usually at least 7 devices
whereas ATA can handle only 2.

Most PCs have two IDE controllers on the motherboard. One IDE controller
can support two devices, so four storage devices is usually the maximum.
Parallel ATA interface uses ribbon cables with 40 pin connectors to connect
the hard drives to the motherboard. The cable has usually three connectors.
Of these one is connected to the motherboard and the rest two are left for
hard drives. If two hard drives are connected to the same controller, one
must be defined as master and the other one as slave. This is done with
jumpers.

Serial ATA, also known as SATA or S-ATA, is a bus used to communicate

between the CPU and internal storage devices such as hard drives and
optical drives. It is designed to eventually replace the ATA (also known as
IDE) bus. Traditional ATA is beginning to be referred to as Parallel ATA, P-
ATA, or PATA to avoid confusion.
The main difference between SATA and PATA is in the cabling. PATA's
ungainly ribbon cables. Instead, SATA has much slimmer and easier to
manage cables. Truly native SATA drives will have different power
connectors also.

Logic Board

On the logic board you will find all circuitry in charge of controlling the hard
drive. In these days of highly integrated devices, you will find just three or
four big integrated circuits on the logic board.

The big circuit is the controller. It is in charge of everything: exchanging

data between the hard drive and the computer, controlling the motors on
the hard drive, commanding the heads to read or write data, etc.
Optionally there is a Flash-ROM circuit where the hard drive firmware is
located. Firmware is the name given to a program that is stored inside a
ROM (Read Only Memory). The hard drive firmware is the program its
controller executes.
The controller doesn’t drive enough current to turn on or move the hard
drive motors. So all hard drives use a motor driver chip. This chip is a
current amplifier. It takes the commands sent from the controller to the
motors and passes them to the motors, but with a higher current.
This motor driver chip is located between the controller chip and the motors.
The fourth main chip you can find on a logic board is the RAM (Random
Access Memory) chip, also known as buffer. This chip has an ultimate role in
the hard drive performance. The higher its capacity, the fastest the data
transfer between the drive and the computer will be.

You may be wonder how we know the function of each chip on the logic
board. Actually it is fairly simple and you can learn the trick from us. Just
type in the numbers located on the first line of the chip package on Google
and it will return a lot of information about the chip!

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Inside the HD

I’ve said this before and i said it again: do not open your hard drive or you
will damage it.
Hard disks are aluminum platters coated on both sides with iron oxide or
thin-film metal. Most hard disk drives use disk packs which are several disk
platters stacked together.
The hard drive can have several discs. There is one read/write read for each
side of the disc – which is also called platter. The heads are stuck together
in an arm. So, all the heads move together. The distance between the head
and the platter is so small that you can’t see it without appropriate devices.
A motor (actually the correct term is “actuator”) called voice coil moves the
arm. It is called “voice coil” because it uses the same idea behind
loudspeakers: a coil inside a magnetic field provided by a magnet.
Depending on the current direction on the coil the arm moves to one side or
to the other side. And depending on the intensity of the current, the
actuator will move more or less.

The platters

The surfaces of the platters have a structure (invisible structure) composed

by tracks, cylinders, sectors and clusters.
Tracks are concentric circumferences. The number of tracks on a disk surface
therefore corresponds to the number of different radial positions of the head(s). The
collection of all tracks on all surfaces at a given radial position is known a cylinder
and each track is divided into sectors.
Sectors can be seen as pizza slice and the intersection between tracks and
sectors origin what we call cluster.
Cluster is an elementary unit of allocation of a disk.
The cluster size is a tradeoff between space efficiency, the bigger is the cluster, the
bigger is on the wasted space at the end of each file.

The capacity of an HD can be calculated with following equation:

Capacity = #cylinders * sectors * heads * 512

Hard Drive Manufacturers (a small list)

Fujitsu
Hitachi Global Storage
IBM
Maxtor
Seagate
Western Digital

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Images

Logic board

HD connectors Actuator

Inside the HD The head

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