Learn more about how the image on the hard disk is stored!

When I went to university back in the seventies, we had a hard disk drive exhibited at our university. I believe it is still there today.
This was one of only two existing copies exiting in the world of this drive and on it you could store up to 5 MB of data.

It was built in the early sixties by Bryant, a British manufacturer and used by Data-Saab a now long time deceased subsidiary of SAAB.
You know!…The car manufacturer!

The drive had several disk platters with a diameter of over 3 feet. And the whole thing occupied a small room.

Although this machine looks a lot different from today’s hard disks, the basic construction and principle have not changed much.

Sure the physical size has decreased considerably, the access time has been reduced dramatically and the memory storage capacity has increased substantially.

The disk platters which are found inside your hard drive are all coated with magnetic materials. There are usually stacked several disk platters on top of each other inside your disk drive.
The data are stored or written as images on the hard disk on coated platters which contains the tracks and sectors.
Inside each tracks there are several sectors where pieces of data files can be found.
To access these tracks there are mounted an electromagnetic head for reading and writing next to each platter. Then the whole thing is spinning fast to achieve fast access time.

Over time the magnetic materials at the hard disk images are worn out and some sectors stop working.
Fortunately the hard drives of today are able to block out these damage sectors so that data loss are minimized.

The truth about any hard disk is that it will stop working as the magnetic material which stores the information on the hard drive becomes worn out. This will happen at some time eventually if the hard disk is used for a long time.

This is something that happens seldom during a computers life time. The hard disks are able to work for longer and longer without causing disk errors and the computers life time in use are normally only 4 to 5 years. At which time it is time for a new and more modern model.

Despite this you need to backup your hard disk to be on the safe side. The best way to do this is to create a backup from the hard disk image onto a backup storage media.



The advantage this gives you is that you can make a hard disk recovery and restore your data backup after a disaster much faster than with another type of backups.

Examine True image 9.1 which makes backup from the hard disk image to a backup media easy to do!