Pc Hard Drives

The hard drive is the part of the computer that stores things, such as the installed operating system, games, applications, and all of the other files on the computer.

Hard drives are not memory. The job of the hard drive is to store files. Regardless of the type of files, the hard drive is basically a digital filing cabinet.

Hard drives come in two basic flavours, Sata and Pata. Pata is an older standard and is rapidly being phased out.

The first four pictures on the right show an old Pata drive, the connectors, and the standard ribbon cables used to connect them.

With Pata drives, you could connect two drives to each cable. You can either set the first drive as the master and the second as the slave or you can set both drives to cable select.

The big challenges with Pata drives were the size of the cables and the fragility of the pins. There are also certain situations where various drives do not work well together in systems.

While there are designer cables available for Pata that are easier to work with, they are still rather bulky and difficult to manipulate.

Perhaps the worst thing about these ribbon cables is that they can cause the pins on either the drive or the motherboard to break. Once a pin is broken on a drive, that drive is dead. With motherboads you lose the socket.

There is no reasonable way to repair this kind of damage, so you have to be very careful when working with Pata drives and their cables.

As a closing note on the ribbon cables, be aware that the wires inside them break easily when the cable is twisted.

The first red cable to the right is a UV reactive Sata cable. It only connects one drive, but it's a much easier design to work with.

These cables are very compact and very flexible. The fragile pins of the Pata connectors have also been replaced with slot connectors, which are much less likely to break.

The second red cable on the right is a 'stock' cable that came with a motherboard. The main difference with these stock cables is that they are usually not UV reactive.

Uv reactive cables glow when exposed to UV light, which can be provided by installing special lighting kits inside the computer case.

With reactive cables and proper lighting you can create some pretty cool case interiors. Please note that UVreactive cables are more of a fashion statement than a technical necessity.

The drive shown on the right is a Sata drive with a cooler attached to the bottom. As you can see, the connectors on this drive are simple slots. There are no fragile pins to deal with and there is no master/slave drive designation.

With Sata drives you simply connect the power cable and then connect the cable between the motherboard and the drive. No further configuration is required.

Of course, you should always turn the power off before doing any work inside your case.

Using a cooler, such as the one on the right, is a good way to extend the life of any hard drive. Hard drives can quickly become hot enough to burn. As with almost any electronics, the hotter they run the shorter they live.

Many different fans are available for hard drives. A decent cooler can cost under $15.

When installing a hard drive, make sure you secure all of the screws and cables firmly. Also make sure that the drives have some form of direct cooling.

Many cases have a socket to mount a 120 mm (or larger) intake fan directly in front of the drive cage.

It is also possible to mount coolers on almost any hard drive, though it is sometimes necessary to make slight modifications to the drive bays inside the case.