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Construction and Operation of the Hard Disk

To many people, a hard disk is a "black box" of sorts--it is thought of as just a small device that
"somehow" stores data. There is nothing wrong with this approach of course, as long as all you care
about is that it stores data. If you use your hard disk as more than just a place to "keep stuff", then
you want to know more about your hard disk. It is hard to really understand the factors that affect
performance, reliability and interfacing without knowing how the drive works internally.
Fortunately, most hard disks are basically the same on the inside. While the technology evolves,
many of the basics are unchanged from the first PC hard disks in the early 1980s.

In this section we dive into the guts of the hard disk and discover what makes it tick. We look at the
various key components, discuss how the hard disk is put together, and explore the various
important technologies and how they work together to let you read and write data to the hard disk.
My goal is to go beyond the basics, and help you really understand the design decisions and
tradeoffs made by hard disk engineers, and the ways that new technologies are being employed to
increase capacity and improve performance.

Hard Disk Operational Overview

As an illustration, I'll describe here in words how the various components in the disk interoperate
when they receive a request for data. Hopefully this will provide some context for the descriptions
of the components that follow in later sections.
A hard disk uses round, flat disks called platters, coated on both sides with a special media material
designed to store information in the form of magnetic patterns. The platters are mounted by cutting
a hole in the center and stacking them onto a spindle. The platters rotate at high speed, driven by a
special spindle motor connected to the spindle. Special electromagnetic read/write devices called
heads are mounted onto sliders and used to either record information onto the disk or read
information from it. The sliders are mounted onto arms, all of which are mechanically connected
into a single assembly and positioned over the surface of the disk by a device called an actuator. A
logic board controls the activity of the other components and communicates with the rest of the PC.
Each surface of each platter on the disk can hold tens of billions of individual bits of data. These are
organized into larger "chunks" for convenience, and to allow for easier and faster access to
information. Each platter has two heads, one on the top of the platter and one on the bottom, so a
hard disk with three platters (normally) has six surfaces and six total heads. Each platter has its
information recorded in concentric circles called tracks. Each track is further broken down into
smaller pieces called sectors, each of which holds 512 bytes of information.
The entire hard disk must be manufactured to a high degree of precision due to the extreme
miniaturization of the components, and the importance of the hard disk's role in the PC. The main
part of the disk is isolated from outside air to ensure that no contaminants get onto the platters,
which could cause damage to the read/write heads.
Here's an example case showing in brief what happens in the disk each time a piece of information
needs to be read from it. This is a highly simplified example because it ignores factors such as disk
caching, error correction, and many of the other special techniques that systems use today to
increase performance and reliability. For example, sectors are not read individually on most PCs;
they are grouped together into continuous chunks called clusters. A typical job, such as loading a
file into a spreadsheet program, can involve thousands or even millions of individual disk accesses,
and loading a 20 MB file 512 bytes at a time would be rather inefficient:
1. The first step in accessing the disk is to figure out where on the disk to look for the needed
information. Between them, the application, operating system, system BIOS and possibly
any special driver software for the disk, do the job of determining what part of the disk to
read.
2. The location on the disk undergoes one or more translation steps until a final request can be
made to the drive with an address expressed in terms of its geometry. The geometry of the
drive is normally expressed in terms of the cylinder, head and sector that the system wants
the drive to read. (A cylinder is equivalent to a track for addressing purposes). A request is
sent to the drive over the disk drive interface giving it this address and asking for the sector
to be read.
3. The hard disk's control program first checks to see if the information requested is already in
the hard disk's own internal buffer (or cache). It if is then the controller supplies the
information immediately, without needing to look on the surface of the disk itself.
4. In most cases the disk drive is already spinning. If it isn't (because power management has
instructed the disk to "spin down" to save energy) then the drive's controller board will
activate the spindle motor to "spin up" the drive to operating speed.
5. The controller board interprets the address it received for the read, and performs any
necessary additional translation steps that take into account the particular characteristics of
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the drive. The hard disk's logic program then looks at the final number of the cylinder
requested. The cylinder number tells the disk which track to look at on the surface of the
disk. The board instructs the actuator to move the read/write heads to the appropriate track.
6. When the heads are in the correct position, the controller activates the head specified in the
correct read location. The head begins reading the track looking for the sector that was asked
for. It waits for the disk to rotate the correct sector number under itself, and then reads the
contents of the sector.
7. The controller board coordinates the flow of information from the hard disk into a temporary
storage area (buffer). It then sends the information over the hard disk interface, usually to
the system memory, satisfying the system's request for data.

Hard Disk Platters and Media

Every hard disk contains one or more flat disks that are used to actually hold the data in the drive.
These disks are called platters (sometimes also "disks" or "discs"). They are composed of two main
substances: a substrate material that forms the bulk of the platter and gives it structure and rigidity,
and a magnetic media coating which actually holds the magnetic impulses that represent the data.
Hard disks get their name from the rigidity of the platters used, as compared to floppy disks and
other media which use flexible "platters" (actually, they aren't usually even called platters when the
material is flexible.)
The platters are "where the action is"--this is where the data itself is recorded. For this reason the
quality of the platters and particularly, their media coating, is critical. The surfaces of each platter
are precision machined and treated to remove any imperfections, and the hard disk itself is
assembled in a clean room to reduce the chances of any dirt or contamination getting onto the
platters.

This Barracuda hard disk has 10 platters.

The form factor of the hard disk also has a great influence on the number of platters in a drive. Even
if hard disk engineers wanted to put lots of platters in a particular model, the standard PC "slimline"
hard disk form factor is limited to 1 inch in height, which limits the number of platters that can be
put in a single unit. Larger 1.6-inch "half height" drives are often found in servers and usually have
many more platters than desktop PC drives. Of course, engineers are constantly working to reduce
the amount of clearance required between platters, so they can increase the number of platters in
drives of a given height.
Tracks and Sectors
Platters are organized into specific structures to enable the organized storage and retrieval of data.
Each platter is broken into tracks--tens of thousands of them--which are tightly-packed concentric
circles. These are similar in structure to the annual rings of a tree (but not similar to the grooves in a
vinyl record album, which form a connected spiral and not concentric rings).
A track holds too much information to be suitable as the smallest unit of storage on a disk, so each
one is further broken down into sectors. A sector is normally the smallest individually-addressable
unit of information stored on a hard disk, and normally holds 512 bytes of information. The first PC
hard disks typically held 17 sectors per track. Today's hard disks can have thousands of sectors in a
single track, and make use of zoned recording to allow more sectors on the larger outer tracks of the
disk.

A platter from a 5.25" hard disk, with 20 concentric tracks drawn

over the surface. This is far lower than the density of even the oldest
hard disks; even if visible, the tracks on a modern hard disk would
require high magnification to resolve. Each track is divided into
16 imaginary sectors. Older hard disks had the same number of
sectors per track, but new ones use zoned recording with a different
number of sectors per track in different zones of tracks.
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Head Actuator
The actuator is the device used to position the head arms to different tracks on the surface of the
platter (actually, to different cylinders, since all head arms are moved as a synchronous unit, so each
arm moves to the same track number of its respective surface). The actuator is a very important part
of the hard disk, because changing from track to track is the only operation on the hard disk that
requires active movement: changing heads is an electronic function, and changing sectors involves
waiting for the right sector number to spin around and come under the head (passive movement).
Changing tracks means the heads must be shifted, and so making sure this movement can be done
quickly and accurately is of paramount importance. This is especially so because physical motion is
so slow compared to anything electronic--typically a factor of 1,000 times slower or more.
Head actuators come in two general varieties:

Stepper Motors: Originally, hard disk drives used a stepper motor to control the movement
of the heads over the surface of the platters. A regular motor turns in a rotary fashion
continuously; it can stop at any point in its rotation as it spins around, kind of like the
second hand on a wind-up wristwatch. A stepper motor can only stop at predefined "steps"
as it turns around, much the way the second hand turns on an electronic, quartz wristwatch.
A hard drive using a stepper motor for an actuator attaches the arms to the motor, and each
time the motor steps one position clockwise or counterclockwise, the arms move in or out
one position. Each position defines a track on the surface of the disk. Stepper motors are
also commonly used for both turning the spindle and positioning the head on floppy disk
drives. If you have a floppy drive, find one of its motors and turn it slowly with your hand;
you will feel the discrete step-wise nature of its motion.

A stepper motor actuator. The motor moves in steps, which you can feel if
you move the motor shaft by hand. The shaft has two thin strips of metal
wrapped around it, which are connected to a pivot that is rigidly attached
to the actuator arms. As the motor shaft turns, one half of this "split band"
coils onto the shaft and the other half uncoils. When the motor turns in the
opposite direction the process reverses. As this occurs the pivot moves
and in doing so, moves the actuator arms and the hard disk heads.

Voice Coils: The actuator in a modern hard disk uses a device called a voice coil to move
the head arms in and out over the surface of the platters, and a closed-loop feedback system
called a servo system to dynamically position the heads directly over the data tracks. The
voice coil works using electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. A coil is wrapped around a
metal protrusion on the end of the set of head arms. This is mounted within an assembly
containing a strong permanent magnet. When current is fed to the coil, an electromagnetic
field is generated that causes the heads to move in one direction or the other based on
attraction or repulsion relative to the permanent magnet. By controlling the current, the
heads can be told to move in or out much more precisely than using a stepper motor. The
name "voice coil" comes from the resemblance of this technology to that used to drive audio
speakers, which are also basically electromagnets. All PC hard disk voice coil actuators are
rotary, meaning that the actuator changes position by rotating on an axis.

A partially-disassembled voice coil actuator. The magnet assembly has

been unscrewed from its mounting and pulled to the left to expose the
coil. The magnet assembly consists of two metal plates (top one easily
visible above, and part of the bottom one visible.) The magnet itself is
mounted on the underside of the top plate, and spacers used between
the plates to create the gap for the coil assembly. Being non-ferrous the
coil moves freely between the plates, rotating the actuator on its axis
as its magnetic polarity is changed. (Incidentally, the magnet is strong
enough that after removing the spacers between the plates, the bottom plate
got "stuck" on the magnet and required considerable effort to remove!)

Head Crashes
Since the read/write heads of a hard disk are floating on a microscopic layer of air above the disk
platters themselves, it is possible that the heads can make contact with the media on the hard disk
under certain circumstances. Normally, the heads only contact the surface when the drive is either
starting up or stopping. Considering that a modern hard disk is turning over 100 times a second, this
is not a good thing. :^)
If the heads contact the surface of the disk while it is at operational speed, the result can be loss of
data, damage to the heads, damage to the surface of the disk, or all three. This is usually called a
head crash, two of the most frightening words to any computer user. :^) The most common causes
of head crashes are contamination getting stuck in the thin gap between the head and the disk, and
shock applied to the hard disk while it is in operation.
Despite the lower floating height of modern hard disks, they are in many ways less susceptible to
head crashes than older devices. The reason is the superior design of hard disk enclosures to
eliminate contamination, more rigid internal structures and special mounting techniques designed to
eliminate vibration and shock. The platters themselves usually have a protective layer on their
surface that can tolerate a certain amount of abuse before it becomes a problem. Taking precautions
to avoid head crashes, especially not abusing the drive physically, is obviously still common sense.
Be especially careful with portable computers; I try to never move the unit while the hard disk is
active.