A Hard Drive at Work

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With hard drives becoming ever quieter and less audibly intrusive it is becoming increasingly easy to forget just how feverishly the hard disk is working behind the scenes whilst you are browsing the contents of your folders, saving, copying and pasting, renaming and so on.

Thanks to a chap by the name of Joshua Marius if you have ever wanted to see just how hard your hard drive is working to serve your every command you can via an insightful video taken of the innards of hard disk as it goes about its daily business.

If, like me, you have always wanted to see a hard disk in action (but have never quite got round to destroying one of your own disks for the privilege) you can view the video after the jump.

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Did you know?

• The first ever hard drive was created as long ago as 1956 and had a capacity of a mere five megabytes stored on no less than fifty 24” disks.
• In modern drives the height of the read/write head above the disk (referred to as the Flying Height) is less that 3-7 millionths of an inch. To put that into perspective, your average dust particle measures a whopping .00150 of an inch.
• The smallest hard drive in the world is Toshiba’s 0.85″ HHD, which is roughly the size of a stamp and has 4GB capacity.

Toshiba’s 0.85″ HDD
The World’s Smallest Hard Disk

If you would like to know more concerning hard disks and how they work, you can find a wealth of information on this site. There are also a number of flash presentations concerning hard disks and how they function which have been provided by IBM, which can be viewed via this link.

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