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The Hard Disk Drive (better known as Hard Drive) Is a component within the computer that stores all the computers data in it. It is the computers permanent memory, the operating system, most applications, and other things are stored on the Hard Drive.
The amount of data that a hard drive can hold is usually measured in Gigabytes (GB), although some older really early hard drives had as little as 5MB! Some newer hard drives can hold up to 400 GB of data! Most new computers, however, have a hard drive that can hold between 40 GB and 160 GB, which is still plenty of space to do nearly anything on your computer.
The inside of a hard drive may not be exactly what you expect it to be, the inside is actually a spinning disk, with an arm over it, the disk (usually metal), much like a CD, is where all the data is stored in the hard drive, The arm has a needle on the end which reads the data off of the disk, kind of like an old record player.
Most hard drives now days connect to the motherboard using an ATA/IDE cable (big long flat ribbon cable also know as Parallel ATA),They also connect via SCSI or SATA. Although ATA/IDE (aka PATA, Parallel ATA, ribbon cable) hard drives are the most common, SATA (or Serial ATA) hard drives are becoming the new way to go with hard drives, as traditional PATA hard drives can transferr on up to 133 MB/s SATA has a current transferr rate of 150 MB/s and a potential in the near future of up to 600 MB/s!! They also use much thinner wires that can be up to twice as long as a standard PATA cable, allowing for better cooling in the system.
Hard drives, in general, have two (2) connections on the backside, the connection for the data cable (usually IDE (PATA) or SATA) and a power adapter connection, PATA hard drives also have a jumper setting on the backside. The jumpers are useful because in many cases more than one hard drive (or CD/DVD) can share an IDE cable. The computer cannot distinguish the difference between the two items, so one item is set (using the jumpers) to the master drive, and the other is set to slave.SATA hard drives on the other hand, do not need jumpers, as they allow only one device per cable.
In the above picture the long slot connection (on the left) with alot of small pins in it is the IDE connection. to the right of it (also has a few pins in it) are the jumper settings, then on the right is the power connection.