2. What is a Hard Drive for?

In its simplest form, a Hard drive, Hard disc or Winchester, is used to store data in a digital form.
Without a hard drive, everything must be loaded each time it is required. This includes the operating system, and all required drivers, and the applications that are to be used.
With floppy disks, or even CD / DVD ROM drives, this would be a slow process compared to the potential speed of a hard drive. It is required to make any computer system efficient.[7]

What are the advantages to hard drives?

• One of the main advantages of a hard drive is that it is capable of storing this data after the power has been shut off.
• It delivers and records data faster than an unreliable floppy disc.
• It is random access that makes it faster to access than a tape drive.
• It is capable of a vast amount more data storage than a floppy disc.
• It is considerably more reliable than a floppy disc Including even the earliest of drives).
• As a result of this, it is more cost effective to use a hard disc.

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What are the drawbacks of hard drives?

• They are not as portable as floppy discs.
  This is because hard drives are designed to be fixed disks, mounted inside a case.
  To make a hard drive portable, it is possible to mount one in a removable caddy, however both computers must use the same caddy and the drive would need to be installed as a fixed drive.
• Hard drives are sensitive to shock.
  Being compact, lightweight and portable, at some time in its life a floppy disk will be dropped and bounced. It is likely that when this occurs, when inserted into a floppy disk drive, the data is still intact. Should one manage to do this with a hard disk, it is extremely unlikely that the drive will remain in working order, and the data previously held on the disk will be unreadable (without costly data recovery services).

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Gregg Williams, 294805, CS_134 Web Report