Tuesday, January 31, 2012

How Data is Stored on a Hard Disk Drive

By Brian Shaw


The way in which info is stored on hard disk drives is methodical and logical. When you "save" info to the hard disk drive, it'll do so in a logical way.

Binary Rule

The brain of the PC is made up of many switches. As switches, they can either be "on" or "off," or a binary set of values like to 0 or 1. As such, the PC is said to know only one language and that is binary.

Everything in your personal computer machine reduces down to 0's and 1's. Anything digital is made up of "bits." A bit is one switch or binary digit. The binary number "0101" has 4 bits. But computing machines don't work in terms of singular bits but apropos larger storage units.

A storage unit is 1, precise amount of one or two binary digits. It can so be said that a bit is a single binary digit which can only store one of two values. Four bits equal a nibble. 2 nibbles make up one byte, 2 bytes make up one word, 2 words make a double-word and 2 double-words make up a quad-word.

Your personal computer can store only a finite number of storage units or bytes. The digital data therefore stored refers to the values represented by the storage units kept on a digital device.

Hexadecimal Rule

The minimum cost of a storage unit is always nil but its maximum value relies on the number of bits which makes it up. Let's take for an example the nibble. It is made from four bits, so that its range is from "0000b" to "1111b." By the method of changing binary to decimal, we can arrive at a selection of "0" to "15." And "15" in hexadecimal is only "0xF." As such, a nibble represents a single hexadecimal digit just in the same way as a bit represents a single binary digit.

2 hex digits equal to a byte, 4 hexadecimal digits to a word, 8 hexadecimal digits to a double word and 16 hexadecimal digits to a quad-word. This is way more concise than the voluminous quantity of bits associated with it. It can hence be related the hex numbering system is really handy when handling storage units. And there's the added convenience of straightforward conversion from binary to hex and vice versa.

When you remember that a byte is composed of any of 256 values, you can have a concept on just how giant the info a gb. or terabyte of hard disk can store.




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