Techreluctant.com

When I worked on a help desk and people would call in, they would sometimes have to bring their computers in for service. They would inevitably ask, “so do I have to just bring in the hard drive?” They, like many people referred to their computer as the hard drive. They meant the tower, that’s the tower part which holds all the computer stuff, as opposed to the peripherals of a computer like a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and printer. The hard drive actually resides inside your computer’s tower and it’s where all your files, folders and your operating system hang out.

The hard drive looks a bit like a record player (if you remember them). There’s a little arm and even a platter that goes around and around. The data for your computer is on that platter (or platters). How it gets there involves magnets and alloys and stuff you really don’t need to concern yourself with but if you want to know more check out this article at How Stuff Works.

What you need to know about your hard drive is that it is one type of memory in your computer. There’s another type of memory in your computer called RAM or Random Access Memory and we’ll discuss that one next week. The hard drive is usually measured in hundreds of gigabytes these days and the more gigabytes the more files and stuff you can put on your computer. The hard drive will hold all your data until you delete it or until it fails. You should remember that hard drives can fail and that’s why keeping copies of your important data, like pictures and important documents to name just a couple of things, is vital. Back up those things to other media like a recordable DVD, a recordable CD-ROM, a flash drive or an external hard drive. And if you ever have to bring your computer in for repair, you can ask if it’s just the tower that you need to bring in because you know it’s not called the hard drive.