What are the platters in hard drives made out of?
477956
Hard drive platters are made of glass or aluminum alloy and coated with iron oxide or other magnetic material to hold the information. I was surprised that they were glass, I dropped one from some height one time for fun and it shattered all over the place.\nRead more at:\nhttp://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Hardware_Software/2002/InsideHardDrive.asp
647719
Hard Drives rely on read heads that fly over the disk, there are filters to prevent air contaminated with small particles from getting into the hard drive but it does not keep the air in.\n\nYou bring a laptop into space the Hard Drive is going to be in vacuum and there is going to be no air to keep the disk heads above the platters.  The Hard drive will be ruined, probably very quickly.\n\nIf you solve that by putting a solid state hard drive in your laptop then you have the problem of heat, namely that modern laptops tend to have compontents that run very hot and so need their cooling fans when running at full speed.  In space it is more likely that the computer would heat up and fry than freeze.\n\nIf you want a laptop to use on a spacewalk you'd probably want it to be a special design with a solid state hard drive and low power components (which won't have high performance but won't cause it to burn up.  Rad hardened components would be very nice too.
1119787
You mean SATA II hard drives. Well SATA II hard drives are the most common for home PCs and it is actually very common since it is one of the only types you can get for a home PC. The reason you are having trouble finding your hard drive is due to the size you want it to be. Most PCs carry only a 250 GB or 300 GB hard drive. Rarely could you buy a PC that carries anything larger. Therefore you would rarely find one for sale at that size. What you may want to do is buy two 250GB SATA II drives for a combination of 500GB. This may cost a bit more though unless you pre-order these 500 GB drives, you won't have much selection in normal electronic stores.\n\nEDIT: When you are looking for hard drives, make sure you are looking for internal hard drives, and for desktop PCs.
756054
you can get a exturnal hard drive case and put the the hard drive in it and get the data off it that way, or you can put the drive in to the computer.
1154009
This makes no sense.  There are no keys that control the hard drive.  The programs and data on the PC control it.\n\nWhat are you trying to do.
84322
Its the memory disk in you computer.  Its hard - a solid disk.  The term made more sense when the only portable memory device was a soft plastic "Floopy" disk about five inches wide.
739404
Well using some very basic terms...basically a hard drive is made up of what they call metal platters.  Think of a dinner plate but much smaller and made of metal.  There is what is called an armature that moves back in forth over the platters and attached to the arm is a little tiny device called read/write head.  This device uses magnetic fields to change the polarity in a very small part of the metal platter.  If the charge the device creates is less then a certain amount then the computer reads it as a 0 and if the charge is greater than a certain amount the computer reads it as a 1.  This produces the binary code that computer process all commands in.\n\nThe read/write both records and retrieves the magnetic charge on the different areas of the platters and most hard drives have anywhere from 4 to 8 platters.\n\nThere is also of course a whole lot more to hard drives such as caching and learning about sectors/head/tracks and cylinders.\n\nI would recommend maybe getting a computer book from Barnes and Nobles or Borders.  Also you might want to check www.howstuffworks.com and doing a search on hard drives!
501795
lol are you SERIOUS?  A floppy disk.  OLD technology. Its a squarish disk about 3 1/2 inches long on each side.
66755
True bad sector on a harddrive are physically damaged.  Software might find them and mark them so that they are not used, but software cannot correct the damage.
28136
A hard drive consist of one or more magnetic media platters on which digital data can be written and erased magnetically.\n\nWhen you buy a new hard drive, the manufacturer does not what operating system you are going to use, therefore they leave the platters unformated.\n\nThen the user formats, or magnetically prepares the disk to receive data. Once the disk is formated, data can be written on it.\n\nIf you format a hard drive, you will bring it back to its "new" state, deleting all the information that once was written on it. During formating, bad sectors can be detected and they will be marked so no data will be written on them.\n\nThere are two kinds of formating, logical and  physical format.\n\nPhysical or low-level format is a process that prepares the disk dividing it into tracks, sectors and cylinders.\n\nLogical format:is a process in which a file system is placed on the disk. (most likely to be the format of your question =) )
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Input / Output.\n\nIn short getting data in and out of the operating system or cpu from disk and memory.\n\nYou probably have a bad hard drive.\n\n...\n\nBad disks can usually still be partially read from. They are made up of many platters and parts. It may be that only a part of the drive is dead. To know for sure use a disk verification tool, it may be able to map around the bad parts is the drive motor itself is still okay.
66831
i couldnt find a list so i leave you some links\n\n1st a collection of computer ads that might bring some light to this matter\n\nthere are some prices on the next link\n\non the last link you'll find comparison of Hard drive space
163583
If a hard drive is making a lot of clicking noises, it's about to crash!
84928
There is a software called Easy recovery that has tools for testing the mechanical and logical functions of any hard drive.  You need another hard drive if you are going to attemp any data recovery though.  Check the website.
1106237
That is right for Desktop computers\nFor laptops\nYou do the same with 4 screws in the bottom of laptop that holds the hard drive, how would you know? you have to search.\nand also there will be 4 screws holding the hard drive and replace with new one.\n\nTake care the laptop hard drive are all the same but have differant holders.\nDesktop hard drives are same also. but not the same as laptop hard drives\n\nXLMan
29175
They're essentially hot-swappable drives which contain all of the interface components on the other side of the handle. They're "Hard drives on a mounting plate."\n\nHope that helps.
93914
I'm not sure what they're made of, but has anybody else noticed that they look like tinted CDs?