Hard disk

High school (ages 12+)
Animals & Nature

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/hard-disk

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the storage medium?Magnetized rotating platters
2. What is the primary application?Mass data storage and archiving
3. What is a hard disk drive?A hard disk drive, or HDD, is a device inside a computer that keeps your games, photos, and videos. It uses spinning disks with magnetic material to write and read tiny bits of data. The read/write head moves over the disks to access the information.
4. How does a hard disk store information?The disks spin very fast and have a magnetic coating. Tiny sections on the disks are magnetized in different directions to represent 0s and 1s. The read/write head reads or changes these magnetic directions to save or get data.

Actuator Arm: Mechanical component that moves the read/write heads across the platters.
Magnetic Encoding: Process of storing data by altering the magnetic orientation of particles.
Cost per Gigabyte: The economic efficiency of storing data, a key advantage of HDDs.