Hard Disk Drive

A
REPORT ON

HARD DISK

Submitted by-
Miss.Snehal Kharode (3R)
Miss.Shubhangi Humane (3R)
Miss. Shital Gite (3R) Miss. Sonam
Gupta (3R)
Guided by:
Prof. D. R. Dhotre
[Session: 2010-2011]
Department of Computer Science And
Engineering, Shri Sant Gajanan Maharaj
1
 College Of Engineering, Shegaon-
444203(M.S.)

Hard Disk Drive

Contents

1. History…………………………………………………………………….2

2. Definition…………………………………………….…………………..2

3. Types of hard disk…………………………………..……………………3

4. Technology…….………………………………………………………… 4

5. Capacity and access

speed……………………………………………….7

6. Form factors………………………………………………………………8

7. Performance characteristics………………………………………...
…...9

8. Access and interfaces……………………………………………...

…….10

9. Vendors…………………………………………………………………..11

10.
References……………………………………………………………….12
 Hard Disk Drive

History
HDDs i.e. Hard Disk Drive were originally developed for use with general purpose
computers. During the 1990, the need for large-scale, reliable storage, independent of a
particular device, led to the introduction of embedded systems such as RAID systems,
network attached storage (NAS) systems, and storage area network (SAN) systems that
provide efficient and reliable access to large volumes of data. In the 21st century, HDD
usage expanded into consumer applications such as camcorders, cellphones (for
example the Nokia N91), digital audio players, digital video players, digital video
recorders, personal digital assistants and video game consoles.

Definition
A hard disk is part of a unit, often called a "disk drive," "hard drive," or "hard disk
drive," that stores and provides relatively quick access to large amounts of data on an
electromagnetically charged surface or set of surfaces. Today's computers typically come
with a hard disk that contains several billion bytes (gigabytes) of storage.

Hard Disk Drive Types

The original personal computer design did not include hard disk drives. Hard disk
drives were reserved for large mainframe computers and remained highly proprietary in
design. Today, there are four types of hard drives, each with its own method of
installation.
ST506
The very first hard disk drives for personal computers used the ST-506/412 interface. It
was developed by Seagate Technologies in 1980 and originally appeared with the 5-MB
ST-506 drive. The ST-506 was priced at $3,000 and had a capacity of 5 MB. The ST-
506/412 was the only hard drive available for the IBM computer and was the first to be
supported by the ROM BIOS chip on the motherboard.
ESDI
The ESDI (Enhanced Small Device Interface) was introduced in 1983 by the Maxtor
Corporation. This technology moved many of the controller functions directly onto the
hard disk drive itself. This greatly improved data transfer speeds. Some ESDI controllers
3
even offered enhanced command sets, which supported autosensing of the drive's
geometry by the motherboard's ROM BIOS. The installation of ESDI drives was almost
identical to the installation of ST-506 drives. The high cost of ESDI drives and advances
in other drive technologies spelled their doom. Today they are obsolete.

IDE/EIDE
The IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) drive arrived on the scene in the early 1990s and
incorporated the benefits of both its predecessors. IDE quickly became the standard for
computers. It supports the ST-506 standard command set, and its limited controller
functions build directly on the drive's logic board. This results in a much less expensive
design. Most new motherboards have the IDE connections built in; thus, the chips are
part of the board design.
Western Digital and Compaq developed the 40-pin IDE ISA pinout specification. ANSI
(the American National Standards Institute) standards committees accepted the
standard as the Common Access Method (CAM) AT. The official name for these drives is
now ATA/CAM (AT Attachment/Common Access Method). The terms IDE and
ATA/CAM are interchangeable.
Enhanced IDE (EIDE) adds a number of improvements to the standard IDE drives,
including:
• Increased data throughput.
• Support of storage devices other than hard disk drives.
• Up to four IDE devices instead of just two. This actually allows the BIOS to
support two controllers (each with two drives).

SCSI
The Small Computer System Interface or SCSI (pronounced scuzzy) has been around
since the mid-1970s in one or more forms. It is the most robust of the hard disk drive
interfaces, and is popular on network servers and high-performance workstations. Apple
adopted SCSI as its expansion bus standard. The original SCSI standard allowed up to
seven peripheral devices to be daisy-chained (connected in a series) to one common bus
through a single host adapter connected to the computer bus. SCSI-2 upped that to 15,
and some adapters allow multiple chains for even more devices.
The SCSI bus functions as a communications pathway between the computer system bus
and the SCSI device controller. That improves performance, because the card takes over
the low-level commands and frees the system bus during operations that do not involve
RAM. A SCSI adapter uses its own BIOS and firmware to talk to its devices, then uses a
 Hard Disk Drive

software interface layer and drivers to communicate with the operating system. There
are two software interface layers: ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface) and
CAM (Common Access Method). CAM is now obsolete, and ASPI comes with Windows
and other operating systems. In most cases, you won't have to worry about loading the
drivers unless you are updating them or installing a new card that does not have native
drivers available to the operating system.

Technology
Diagram of a computer hard disk drive

HDDs record data by magnetizing ferromagnetic material directionally, to

represent either a 0 or a 1 binary digit. They read the data back by detecting the
magnetization of the material. A typical HDD design consists of a spindle that holds one
or more flat circular disks called platters, onto which the data is recorded. The platters
are made from a non-magnetic material, usually aluminum alloy or glass, and are coated
with a thin layer of magnetic material, typically 10–20 nm in thickness — for reference,
standard copy paper is 0.07–0.18 millimetre thick — with an outer layer of carbon for
protection. Older disks used iron(III) oxide as the magnetic material, but current disks
use a cobalt-based alloy.

The platters are spun at very high speeds. Information is written to a platter as it
rotates past devices called read-and-write heads that operate very close over the
5
magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the
magnetization of the material immediately under it. In modern drives there is one head
for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An
actuator arm moves the heads on an arc across the platters as they spin, allowing each
head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins. The arm is moved
using a voice coil actuator or in some older designs a stepper motor.

The magnetic surface of each platter is conceptually divided into many small sub-
micrometre-sized magnetic regions, each of which is used to encode a single binary unit
of information. Initially the regions were oriented horizontally, but beginning about
2005, the orientation was changed to perpendicular. Due to the polycrystalline nature of
the magnetic material each of these magnetic regions is composed of a few hundred
magnetic grains. Magnetic grains are typically 10 nm in size and each form a single
magnetic domain. Each magnetic region in total forms a magnetic dipole which
generates a highly localized magnetic field nearby.

A write head magnetizes a region by generating a strong local magnetic field. Early
HDDs used an electromagnet both to magnetize the region and to then read its magnetic
field by using electromagnetic induction. Later development made use of spintronics; in
these heads, the magnetoresistive effect was much greater than in earlier types, and was
dubbed "giant" magnetoresistance (GMR). In today's heads, the read and write elements
are separate, but in close proximity, on the head portion of an actuator arm. The read
element is typically magneto-resistive while the write element is typically thin-film
inductive.

Grain boundaries are very important to HDD design. The grains are very small and
close to each other, so the coupling between adjacent grains is very strong. When one
grain is magnetized, the adjacent grains tend to be aligned parallel to it or
 Hard Disk Drive

demagnetized. Then both the stability of the data and signal-to-noise ratio will be
sabotaged. A clear grain boundary can weaken the coupling of the grains and
subsequently increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In longitudinal recording, the single-
domain grains have uniaxial anisotropy with easy axes lying in the film plane. Adjacent
magnets attract to each other and magnetostatic energy is much lower. So, much higher
areal density can be achieved in perpendicular recording. Another unique feature in
perpendicular recording is that a soft magnetic underlayer is incorporated into the
recording disk. This underlayer is used to conduct writing magnetic flux so that the
writing is more efficient. Error handling

Modern drives also make extensive use of Error Correcting Codes (ECCs),
particularly Reed–Solomon error correction. These techniques store extra bits for each
block of data that are determined by mathematical formulae. The extra bits allow many
errors to be fixed. While these extra bits take up space on the hard drive, they allow
higher recording densities to be employed, resulting in much larger storage capacity for
user data. In 2009, in the newest drives, low-density parity-check codes (LDPC) are
supplanting Reed-Solomon. LDPC codes enable performance close to the Shannon
Limit and thus allow for the highest storage density available.

Typical hard drives attempt to "remap" the data in a physical sector that is going
bad to a spare physical sector—hopefully while the number of errors in that bad sector is
still small enough that the ECC can completely recover the data without loss. The
S.M.A.R.T. system counts the total number of errors in the entire hard drive fixed by
ECC, and the total number of remappings, in an attempt to predict hard drive failure.

Architecture

A hard disk drive with the platters and motor hub removed showing the copper
colored stator coils surrounding a bearing at the center of the spindle motor. The orange
stripe along the side of the arm is a thin printed-circuit cable. The spindle bearing is in
the center.

7
 A typical hard drive has two electric motors, one to spin the disks and one to
position the read/write head assembly. The disk motor has an external rotor attached to
the platters; the stator windings are fixed in place. The actuator has a read-write head
under the tip of its very end (near center) a thin printed-circuit cable connects the read-
write head to the hub of the actuator. A flexible, somewhat 'U'-shaped, ribbon cable,
seen edge-on below and to the left of the actuator arm in the first image and more
clearly in the second, continues the connection from the head to the controller board on
the opposite side.

The head support arm is very light, but also rigid; in modern drives, acceleration at
the head reaches 550 Gs.

(Fig. A disassembled and labeled 1997 hard drive.)

The silver-colored structure at the upper left of the first image is the top plate of the
permanent-magnet and moving coil motor that swings the heads to the desired position
(it is shown removed in the second image). The plate supports a thin neodymium-iron-
boron (NIB) high-flux magnet. Beneath this plate is the moving coil, often referred to as
the voice coil by analogy to the coil in loudspeakers, which is attached to the actuator
 Hard Disk Drive

hub, and beneath that is a second NIB magnet, mounted on the bottom plate of the
motor (some drives only have one magnet).

Capacity and access speed

PC hard disk drive capacity (in GB) over time. The vertical axis is logarithmic, so the
fit line corresponds to exponential growth.

Capacity measurements

Raw unformatted capacity of a hard disk drive is usually quoted with SI prefixes
incrementing by powers of 1000; today that usually means gigabytes and terabytes .
This is conventional for data speeds and memory sizes which are not inherently
manufactured in power of two sizes, as RAM and Flash memory are. Hard disks by
contrast have no inherent binary size as capacity is determined by number of heads,
tracks and sectors.

This can cause some confusion because some operating systems may report the
formatted capacity of a hard drive using binary prefix units which increment by powers
of 1024.A one terabyte (1 TB) disk drive would be expected to hold around 1 trillion
bytes (1,000,000,000,000) or 1000 GB; and indeed most 1 TB hard drives will contain
slightly more than this number. However some operating system utilities would report
this as around 931 GB or 953,674 MB. (The actual number for a formatted capacity will
be somewhat smaller still, depending on the file system). Following are the several ways
of reporting one Terabyte.

A general rule of thumb to quickly convert the manufacturer's hard disk capacity to
the standard Microsoft Windows formatted capacity is 0.93*capacity of HDD from
manufacturer for HDDs less than a terabyte and 0.91*capacity of HDD from
manufacturer for HDDs equal to or greater than 1 terabyte.

HDD Formatting

Modern HDDs, such as SAS and SATA drives, appear at their interfaces as a
contiguous set of logical blocks; typically 512 bytes long but the industry is in the
process of changing to 4,096 byte logical blocks. The process of relating these logical
blocks to their physical location on the HDD is called low level formatting which is
usually performed at the factory and is not normally changed in the field. High level
formatting then writes the file system structures into selected logical blocks to make the
remaining logical blocks available to the host OS and its applications.

Form factors

9
Six hard drives with 8″, 5.25″, 3.5″, 2.5″, 1.8″, and 1″ disks, partially
disassembled to show platters and read-write heads, with a ruler showing
inches.

5¼″ full height 110 MB HDD,

2½″ (8.5 mm) 6495 MB HDD,

US/UK pennies for comparison.

Six hard drives with 8″, 5.25″, 3.5″, 2.5″, 1.8″, and 1″ disks, partially disassembled to
show platters and read-write heads, with a ruler showing inches.

Current hard disk form factors

Form factor Width Height Largest Platters (Max)

Capacity
3.5” 102 mm 25.4 mm 3 TB 5
2.5” 69.9 mm 7-15 mm 1 TB 3
1.8” 54 mm 8 mm 320 TB 3

Performance characteristics
Data transfer rate

As of 2008, a typical 7200 rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer"
data transfer rate of about 70 megabytes per second.[51] This rate depends on the track
location, so it will be higher for data on the outer tracks (where there are more data
sectors) and lower toward the inner tracks (where there are fewer data sectors); and is
generally somewhat higher for 10,000 rpm drives. A current widely used standard for
 Hard Disk Drive

the "buffer-to-computer" interface is 3.0 Gbit/s SATA, which can send about 300
megabyte/s from the buffer to the computer, and thus is still comfortably ahead of
today's disk-to-buffer transfer rates. Data transfer rate (read/write) can be measured by
writing a large file to disk using special file generator tools, then reading back the file.
Transfer rate can be influenced by file system fragmentation and the layout of the files.

The mechanical nature of hard disks introduces certain performance compromises.

The manipulation of sequential data depends upon the rotational speed of the platters
and the data recording density. Because heat and vibration limit rotational speed,
advancing density becomes the sole method to improve sequential transfer rates. While
these advances exponentially increase storage capacity, the performance gains they
enable are linear. As a result, even though the absolute read speed of newer hard drives
is faster, it generally takes longer to back it up.

Seek time

Seek time for non-sequential data ranges from 3 ms[52] for high-end server drives,
to 15 ms for mobile drives, with the most common mobile drives at about 12 ms[53] and
the most common desktop type typically being around 9 ms There has not been any
significant improvement in this speed for some years. Some early PC drives used a
stepper motor to move the heads, and as a result had access times as slow as 80–120
ms, but this was quickly improved by voice coil type actuation in the late 1980s,
reducing access times to around 20 ms.

Power consumption

Power consumption has become increasingly important, not just in mobile devices
such as laptops but also in server and desktop markets. Increasing data center machine
density has led to problems delivering sufficient power to devices (especially for spin
up), and getting rid of the waste heat subsequently produced, as well as environmental
and electrical cost concerns (see green computing). Similar issues exist for large
companies with thousands of desktop PCs. Smaller form factor drives often use less
power than larger drives. Many of the hard drive companies are now producing Green
Drives that require much less power and cooling. Many of these 'Green Drives' spin
slower (<5,400 rpm compared to 7,200, 10,000 or 15,000 rpm) and also generate less
waste heat.

Also in Server and Workstation systems where there might be multiple hard disk drives,
there are various ways of controlling when the hard drives spin up (highest power
draw).

Access and interfaces

Hard disk drives are accessed over one of a number of bus types, including parallel
11
ATA (P-ATA, also called IDE or EIDE), Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI
(SAS), and Fibre Channel. Bridge circuitry is sometimes used to connect hard disk
drives to buses that they cannot communicate with natively, such as IEEE 1394, USB
and SCSI.

For the ST-506 interface, the data encoding scheme as written to the disk surface was
also important. The first ST-506 disks used Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM)
encoding, and transferred data at a rate of 5 megabits per second. Later controllers
using 2,7 RLL (or just "RLL") encoding caused 50% more data to appear under the
heads compared to one rotation of an MFM drive, increasing data storage and data
transfer rate by 50%, to 7.5 megabits per second.

Enhanced Small Disk Interface (ESDI) also supported multiple data rates (ESDI disks
always used 2,7 RLL, but at 10, 15 or 20 megabits per second), but this was usually
negotiated automatically by the disk drive and controller; most of the time, however, 15
or 20 megabit ESDI disk drives weren't downward compatible (i.e. a 15 or 20 megabit
disk drive wouldn't run on a 10 megabit controller). ESDI disk drives typically also had
jumpers to set the number of sectors per track and (in some cases) sector size.

Modern hard drives present a consistent interface to the rest of the computer, no
matter what data encoding scheme is used internally. Typically a DSP in the electronics
inside the hard drive takes the raw analog voltages from the read head and uses PRML
and Reed–Solomon error correction[55] to decode the sector boundaries and sector
data, then sends that data out the standard interface. That DSP also watches the error
rate detected by error detection and correction, and performs bad sector remapping,
data collection for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, and other
internal tasks.

ATA disks have typically had no problems with interleave or data rate, due to their
controller design, but many early models were incompatible with each other and
couldn't run with two devices on the same physical cable in a master/slave setup.Serial
ATA does away with master/slave setups entirely, placing each disk on its own channel
instead.

Venders
 Hard Disk Drive

References

1. This is the original filing date of the application which led to US Patent 3,503,060,
generally accepted as the definitive disk drive patent; see, Kean, David W., "IBM San
Jose, A Quarter Century Of Innovation”, 1977.

2. Other terms used to describe hard disk drives include disk drive, disk file, DASD
(direct-access storage device), fixed disk, CKD disk and Winchester Disk Drive (after the
IBM 3340). The term DASD includes other devices besides disks.

3. "What is hard disk?". Webopedia.com.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/h/hard_disk.html. Retrieved 2010-06-24.

4. "What is hard disk drive?". Techtarget.com.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci213993,00.html. Retrieved
2010-06-24.

5. Magnetic Storage Handbook 2nd Ed., Section 2.1.1, Disk File Technology, Mee and
Daniel, (c)1990,

13