Learn how it pumps vital data to the rest of the system. If a computer's CPU is the brain of the PC, the hard drive serves as the heart, pumping vital data to the rest of the system. As the workhorse component of virtually every computer, the hard drive is also the most mysterious. Most people never see the inside of a hard drive, shrouded in its aluminum housing, though they might be intimately familiar with the files and programs it stores, copies, moves, and deletes for them. The faster a drive spins, the faster you can access and transfer data.
Hard drives provide the data storage on which all modern computers depend.
A hard drive stores information by applying a magnetic field to the moving surface of a disk coated with a magnetic material. A hard drive stores digital data as magnetized spots on the surface of the disk. Each individual hard disk inside a drive is called a platter. The drive contains a motor that spins the platters at speeds from 4500 to 15,000 rotations per minute. Hard drives use a recording device called a head to write data to and read data from each platter surface.