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HARD DISKS

Hard disks hold more information and spin about twenty times faster than floppies. They are also permanently enclosed within their disk drives. You can think of hard disks as records that are encased inside their record players so that the record and the record player function as a single unit. Contrary to what you may think, hard disks are not always larger than floppies, they're simply capable of packing information more tightly, and therefore can store more data in the same amount of space. Most hard drives contain multiple disks, often called platters, which are stacked vertically inside the dive. Typically, each disk has its own pair of read/write heads. Since you never remove hard disks, hard-disk drives do not contain doors or slots, as do their floppy counterparts. This means that the drive itself is completely invisible and sometimes even hard to locate from outside the system unit. In most cases, the hard drive is adjacent to the floppy drive.

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