This cushion can only be properly maintained when the disk is turning at a very constant speed, that is why during spin-up and spin-down the heads need to be moved out of the way into special landing zones. The second point is that the (minimal) distance between head and disk is actually maintained not by a mechanical, but aerodynamic effect - The heads are in fact flying on a cushion of air rotated by the spinning disk. The drive bearings and the motor are designed for constant operation. Simply spoken, hard disks die when switching on and off, not while running. Yes, mechanical disk drives are constantly spinning, for two reasons:įirst, the wear and tear on the motor and drive is much bigger during spin-up and spin-down than when running at a constant speed. Maybe it's no longer the case, but was it at some point a fact that hard disks spun their discs all the time while powered on? Maybe this is seen as a silly question with an obvious answer, but I'm not sure at all. Surely the motor that spins the disc must only be moving when it needs to move to a different section and it cannot be accessed by the needle moving as much as it can? ![]() Maybe it only read the first data needed to boot the OS, and that's what I remember, and after that it settled down when reading from the HDD was less frequent? Why, though? Why cause that kind of wear and tear (and extra noise) at all times? Are, or were in the past, the discs constantly spinning?īecause when you turn on an old computer, you could hear the HDD's motor start and seemingly was spinning the discs as fast as possible, instantly and perpetually. Now I think I understand everything except one pretty basic thing. Turns out it adds/removes electromechanical charges. I only had a vague understanding that there was (at least) one hard disc and some kind of "needle" that did "something", most likely not etching onto the disc since that would be rather bad for rewriteability. ![]() I have to admit that I didn't ever really think about how a hard drive worked until recently.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |