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Hard Drives
Hard drives are the memory of a computer. They store digital information and enable the computer to "remember" things when it's turned off. Hard drives are the reason you are able to store programs, documents, images, and videos on your PC.
Needless to say, hard drives are essential in the overall functioning of a computer. The speed of booting up and running a program has much to do with how fast the hard drive is. The storage capacity of hard drives is also a key consideration. The bigger the disk space, the more data you can store. There was a time when one gigabyte was already an astounding storage space.
Nowadays, a PC with that kind of hard drive is downright laughable. Hard drives also have to be reliable. You can kiss all your data goodbye, from your doctorate thesis to silly blog entries, if your hard drive crashes.
Hard drives have come a long way from their early beginnings in the 1950s. They started as large, bulky devices that had to be stored in data centers because they occupied so much floor space. Personal computers were developed later on with hard drives which initially had a capacity of 20 megabytes. In the late 1990s, hard drives with much larger storage space, from 8 to 20 GB, were produced. Nowadays, desktop hard drives can have capacities of up to 500 GB. Hard drives are also no longer limited to PCs. They are used as well in digital cameras, mobile phones, video recorders, and video game consoles.