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1) Hard-disk drives: A picture of a hard disk drive is shown below. The part tha

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Question

1) Hard-disk drives: A picture of a hard disk drive is shown below. The part that stores data is labeled as #4 and is called the platter. A platter is made of a hard material such as glass or aluminum coated with a thin layer of metal which can be magnetized or demagnetized. What kind of magnetic material (hard or soft) do you think this metal is and why? 7 www.explainthatstuff.com To read data, hard drives make use of a part called a head, labeled #6 in the diagram above. The head is basically a piece of metal that's wrapped in wire. When a reading data from the disk the arm, #2 above, will move the head to a specific location on the disk while the disk is spinning at several thousand revolutions per minute (RPM). What happens in the head component which allows the rest of the computer to process the data Chint: it processesthe data as an electrical signaly? 2) Writing Data: To write data, the process above goes in reverse. Using electromagnetic principles, explain this operation.

Explanation / Answer

Formerly magnetic oxide was used for coating, but now, almost exclusively, a layer of metal called a thin-film medium is used. The material used is very soft to have more storage of data in comparatively in small spaces. Compared to oxide material, thin film material is thick and durable and allows storage of more data in the same space.

The head is a piece of metal that’s wrapped in wire. As the head moves over the magnetic fields on the platter, changes in magnetism induce a current that is measured and converted into a binary value. there are different ways of making hard drive heads and encoding data on the magnetic surface and Faraday’s law of induction is always used.

2. . To write a data on the hard disk, a magnetic field is placed on the tiny field in one of these two polarities: N-S – If North Pole arrives before the south pole and S-N – if the south pole arrives before the north pole while the field is accessed. An orientation in the one direction (like N-S) can represent the ‘1’ while the opposite orientation (S-N) represents “0”. This polarity is sensed by integrated controllers built within the hard disk.