In this day and age nearly everyone knows a little something about computing, whether it is how to download new songs to your iPod or how to download illegal content from your favorite torrent site. The population is generally more technically savvy then we were even three or four years ago. When the average person hears “Hard drive”, most actually know that there are at least two things involved in a hard drive. There are disks and there “needles” or “heads”. Many people think of hard drives as highly advanced record players, and in some aspects they are right. Just like it’s much older grandfather, the hard drive has both a record (platters) and a needle (heads). The platters store data by utilizing magnetization, and the head has the job of both reading these magnetic fields and changing them (what we call writing).
