The Computer Tutor
The Hard Drive
The hard drive is where all the information that your computer uses to function is stored. Your operating system, all the programs that are installed on your computer, all the drivers that allow your video, sound, printer, scanner, and other external devices to function, every file you have ever created or downloaded, every picture or song or video you have saved to your computer resides as a series of molecular grooves on a metal plate inside this rectangular box. A hard drive contains everything that is on your computer, which is why it is always important to keep backups of any important information on external drives or disks such as burned DVDs and CDs or flash drives, because hard drives are complicated machines with many moving parts, and they are not immune to failure.
Like any internal piece of computer equipment, your hard drive can be easily replaced, and most computer towers usually have space inside them for more than one. Adding a second hard drive is a great way to expand your storage capacity, and larger amounts of data storage are being made available for very reasonable prices all the time. If you are an average computer user, you can probably get by with a 40 Gb hard drive in your machine, but if you like to download lots of movies and music, you should probably go with something a little larger, maybe 80 or 120 Gb. If you are an extremely prolific downloader, or if you do a lot of work with video, audio, or other digital media, you want to have a lot of storage space. 500 Gb and 1Tb (a terabyte (Tb) is 1000 Gb) hard drives are a necessity if you need to store a lot of high-quality or complex media information.
Power Connector
This is the plug for the hard drive's power cable. One of the Molex connectors (the small ones with only 4 wires and square white plug heads) from the power supply plugs in here to supply power to the drive.
IDE Connector
This is the port for the IDE cable, or the cable that connects the hard drive to the motherboard so that information can be transferred between the computer and the disk read by the drive. The IDE cable is usually a long, flat, grey cable with a black end that plugs into the drive, a blue end that plugs into the motherboard, and a grey plug near the middle that plugs into a secondary drive if you have more than one in your computer.
Master/Slave Switch
Since this hard drive uses an IDE cable to connect it to the motherboard, it has this jumper that allows you to set the disk as a master or a slave drive. Whenever you plug more than one disk drive into a single IDE cable, using both the black and grey plugs, one of them must be the master and one must be the slave. A diagram just above this plug on the circuit-board side of the hard drive will show you where you have to move the white plastic cover to set the drive as a master or slave.
Now that you have seen what the hard drive on your computer does: