ABSTRACT
The hard drive quietly hums along at thousands of revolutions per minute in its pristine sealed container waiting with its magnetic read head hovering just above the high-velocity spinning surface to transfer data to the screen or accept new information by writing over old data. Properly configured with contiguous files, it is the speed and reliability champ. The hard drive has continued to evolve and grow in capacity since its commercial debut from the hands of IBM back in 1973. Some hard drives are in portable cartridges, but portable storage cartridges such as the Bernoulli, DAT, and the SyQuest rely on linear tape. The popular Zip drives from lomega store 100 megabytes of data on a slightly oversized floppy, while the SyQuest EZFlyer offers 230 megabytes in a disk cartridge. With advance in digital video technology, tapeless video editing and image recording standards such as jpg and MPEG, the hard drive has entered the Land of the Truly Huge.
