What Happens on HARD DRIVE When You
Click "Save"?
1. Microsoft Word tells the operating system (such
as Windows '98) to store your letter in the hard
drive.
2. Your letter, which is currently hanging out in
the computer's main memory (located on the motherboard),
hops on the hard drive interface, and rides it to
the hard drive's cache buffer.
3. Upon arriving in the cache buffer, your letter
is met by the hard disk controller.
4. The hard disk controller receives a communication
from the operating system: "Controller, please
store the document at this address: ****."
5. The read/write heads move into position over the
correct track and wait for the correct sector to pass
under. As soon as it does, the elected head starts
writing the letter onto the elected platter. But what
if the document is really huge and can't fit onto
one sector? If the next sectors on the track are empty,
the drive will continue writing the document there.
If the track fills up and there is still more writing
to be done, however, the drive's first choice
will be to switch heads. Since the heads all move
in unison, all the other heads are positioned over
the same track on their respective platter surfaces.
It is faster to use an alternate head than to reposition
the heads over a new track. A sequential group of
tracks is referred to as a cylinder, because they
are one on top of another, not side by side. This
brings up another interesting point. After you've
owned a hard drive for a while, the availability of
long sequential platter space grows scarce.
Things start getting messy as you throw files away
and add new ones. When this happens your hard drive
is said to be fragmented. As a hard drive becomes
more and more fragmented it loses efficiency because
it is forced to spend more time repositioning its
read/write heads. However, you can do what's called
defragmenting your hard drive. You just need a defragmenting
program, which isn't expensive. The program will
reorganize the data on your hard drive for optimum
efficiency.
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