Best choice for archiving information and mass storage, as they resist degradation over time if kept in a dry environment with a low temperature.Reliable over long periods of time (9-11 years if treated well).This is why files on hard drives are often recoverable even after they’ve been “deleted,” assuming of course that they have not been overwritten already. It’s the same with reformatting a drive essentially, you’re just ignoring the file or files until the hard drive fills that space with new information.īecause of this, the information is still there for a while, waiting to be overwritten. If you delete a file on your computer, you are telling the drive to treat the space like blank space. So what happens when you “delete” a file? The only commands that a traditional hard drive has are “read,” or “write.” Notice that there is no “erase” or “delete” command.

This way, the drive can read the code later and pull the document up again. When you save files, the hard drive magnetically writes the binary code for them into storage cells: So what does this type of storage look like? Picture the capacity of your hard drive like a spreadsheet, like the picture below: One magnetic polarity correlates to “1,” and the other to “0,” so the disk can write and read in binary code. Reading and writing happens by slightly changing the magnetic pattern on the surface of the platter. A series of “platters,” or disks coated in a magnetic material, are rotated at high speed, while the read/write arm follows commands to read or write information, providing you with everything from programs to documents. This is the inside of your traditional hard drive, and it still uses the same style of electromagnetic tech that makes floppy disks and credit card strips work. Not all storage solutions are created equal for the same use case. This general guide should inform how they work, and what you should use the drives for. SSD: which should you put in your PC? While you might not see any difference when saving and moving files around on computers that use either traditional hard drives or SSDs, the two pieces of hardware couldn’t be more different in how they function.

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