Build It. Fix It. Own It.: A Beginner’s Guide to Building and Upgrading a PC

Chapter 4. Hard Drives and Other Storage Devices

	Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
	--Parkinson’s Law of Data

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Drive Time: How a Hard Drive Works

• Capacity, Cache, and More: Understanding Hard Drive Specs

• Buying a Hard Drive

• Disc Driving: Choosing an Optical Drive

• More Storage Devices

When I bought my first computer back in the mid-80s, its storage features were limited to a single 5.25-inch floppy drive. Yup, there was no hard drive in sight. If I wanted to run a program, I’d insert its disk into the floppy drive and run it from there. If I wanted to save some data, I’d have to remove the program disk, swap in a data disk, save my work, and then reinsert the program disk. (A couple of years later I “upgraded” to a ...