Your Glossary Link  hard drive is a storage device that quickly records data as magnetic pulses on spinning metal platters. It is the workhorse component of every computer. Hard drives provide long-term storage for data on your PC. The storage capacities for hard drives seem to grow larger each year.
A bit about Hard Drives

The maximum capacity of a hard drive is determined by a certain set of parameters that describes how the drive and computer will interact. In some cases, changing a single increment of a single parameter may result in the change of the total capacity of the hard drive by well over 100 megabytes.

There are some hard drive controllers and some computers that are unable to utilize the correct parameters for a particular drive. To correct this situation an automatic or manual adjustment of the parameters has to be done. These adjustments may not change the overall capacity of the drive.

Another main factor in determining the capacity of a hard drive is how the manufacturer rates it. Some hard drive manufacturers believe that one-megabyte is the equivalent of one million bytes while another may see it a different way and call one megabyte the equivalent of 1024 bytes squared. By using the one million bytes per megabyte rule, a drive can be described as being larger.

It is always a good thing to check your hard drive capacity. You will want to know just how much of the hard drive space you are utilizing. Many computers come with hard drives with very large storage capacities, but because of the different applications and files and