What is a Hard Drive? It Is The Slowest Data Processing Device On Your Computer!!To answer the question what is a hard drive, and help you speed up your slow computer, it is important you understand that it is the only mechanical data processing device on your computer and therefore it is the slowest data processing device on your computer. All the other data processing devices on your computer such as the memory and the microprocessor are not mechanical, they are electronic, which means they don’t have moving parts. Therefore they are able to do their work much faster than is your hard drive. Its really quite interesting to know that because they are purely electronic and therefore faster, the microprocessor and memory complete their work long before the hard drive. They often have to sit there waiting (twiddling their thumbs?) for the hard drive to finish its work so that they can carry on with whatever you want them to do next. Basically, the hard drive can be a real bottleneck in processing and passing on data. Is the light bulb going on in your head now? Yes. What this means is that if you are experiencing a slow computer, chances are it is because there is something wrong with your hard drive. Perhaps it is too full with data with no free space to write additional data. Or more likely perhaps it is heavily fragmented and the mechanical components are having to work overtime to retrieve and save your data. The mechanical parts you need to know about to understand how fragmentation slows down your hard drive are the spinning platter and the read/write head. The spinning platter is disk shaped and covered in a shiny magnetic material which is where the data is stored. The read/write head is located on an arm that reaches out over the spinning platter in search of the sector where your data is located so that it can read data, or write new data to your hard drive. Whenever the hard drive is instructed to find data the arms containing the read/write heads reach out over the platter to the sector where the data is located. It is this reaching out action which is so crucial to the speed of your computer. If your data is located in many different locations, or in other words, if it is highly fragmented, then the read/write head must do many many different reaches. It is much better if you have done a disk defrag and your data is located in one or two compact locations. This will mean the read/write heads don’t have to work overtime travelling great distances to find your files. Instead they can pick up or write your files in just one or two quick swooshes and move on to their next job. It's kind of like having all of your clothes scattered in many different locations throughout your room rather than all where they should be in the wardrobe. It takes you a lot longer to get dressed in the morning when you have to rummage around your room to find that favorite pair of jeans, t-shirt and clean socks doesn't it? The same principle applies to a fragmented hard drive. So in summary, your hard drive is a lot slower than your memory or your processor at processing data. This is because the read write head has to move around to gather together your files. If your files have been defragmented, then it doesn't need to move around anywhere near as much as prior to defragmentation saving time. This, multiplied many times, is why doing a disk defrag speeds up your slow computer. I hope that this quick definition of what is a hard drive, in the context of defragmentation has assisted you more in understanding how a hard drive works and how defragmentation can assist in speeding it up and therefore in speeding up your slow computer.
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