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What is a Hard Drive?

 

A hard drive is nothing more than a magnetised storage area. Your Operating System is stored on your hard drive, as well as all your software programmes, like Microsoft Word. The hard drive is actually a few circular disks stacked one on top of the other. A little arm moves over the disks and writes things to these circular platters, and reads them. When you save a file or create a new folder, think of these circular platters being written to and you'll have a basic idea of just what your hard drive is.

A hard drive is given a letter of the alphabet for convenience sake, and in most computers this will be the letter C. That's why the hard drive is popularly know as the C Drive. There are other drives on your computer. These are the usual drives on modern Personal Computers:

 

Floppy Drive or A drive  

There will be a thin slot on the front of your computer. Into the gap, a disk is inserted. This is your floppy drive, and the disk is called a floppy disk.


CD Rom Drive or D Drive Press a button on the front of your computer and a tray will probably slide out. The tray will accept a circular disk - a CD Rom.


DVD Drive

A DVD disk is the same size and shape as a CD, but can hold more information. You can play a CD in a DVD Drive, but you can't play a DVD disk in a CD Rom Drive


CD/DVD Writer These types of drives are for creating your own CD's or DVD's. They are becoming statndard on a new computer

A modern Hard Drive is measured in Gigabytes. To find out how big your Hard drive is, click the next part of this lesson.

How Big is your Hard Drive?

Find the "My Computer" icon Start menu, and click with your left mouse button. When the window opens it will look something like this one:




The "My Computer" screen shows you different areas of your computer. In the picture, there are icons for the Floppy Drive, The C drive, and the D Drive. Don't worry if yours is not the same. But you'll probably have a D drive icon. There is a CD over the D drive icon, indicating that there is a CD in the disk drive on this computer.

The one we're interested in is the C drive icon. This is the Hard drive. There are two ways you can check your Hard drive to see how big it is. The easiest way is to click once on the C icon with your Left mouse button. The area on the left of the window will change to this:



The "Details" section at the bottom is showing how much space is free on your hard drive. It also shows how big the Hard drive is. GB stand for Gigabytes. So this Hard drive is just over 4 gigabytes. Not very big in today's computer market, where Hard drive ten and twenty times this size are common!

There is another way to check how big your Hard drive is.

Click on the C icon from the My Computer screen. But click on it with your Right mouse button. You'll get a menu similar to the one below.



Click on "Properties" with your Left mouse button. You'll get the following dialogue box popping up.



Here, we get a pie chart showing us information about the hard drive: Used Space, Free Space and Capacity (How big your hard drive is). The Capacity is showing 19.0 Gigabytes, Used space 17.9 Gigabytes, and Free space 1.01 Gigabytes.

Click the OK button to get rid of the dialogue box (One click with the left mouse button.)

Get rid of the "My Computer" screen by clicking the red X in the top right hand corner.

 

Moving Folders on your Hard Drive

 

Drag and Drop Moving

The easiest way to move one folder to another folder is to use drag and drop. And the easiest way to explain drag and drop is by doing it!

To drag the new folder you created earlier and drop it inside your "My Documents" folder, do the following:


  • Click on your new folder once with the left hand mouse button
  • The folder will be highlighted
  • Keep you left hand mouse button held down
  • Move your mouse around the screen. You should see a faint outline of the folder moving with your mouse
  • Now move the folder over the top of the folder called "My Documents" (Still with your Left mouse button held down!)
  • The My Documents folder will be highlight as well
  • Once your My Documents folder is highlighted, let go of your left hand mouse button
  • The new folder will disappear. It has been moved to My Documents


In the image below, a folder called "MyWPProjects" is being dragged to the My Documents folder on the C Drive.



Cut and Paste Moving

If all that was a bit tricky, you can use Cut and Paste to move your folder instead.

To cut and paste one folder inside another, do the following:


  • Click on the folder you want to move (One click, left hand button), in our case "My WP Projects"
  • From the File, Edit, View, Go menu bar in Windows Explorer click "Edit"
  • From the menu that drops down, click the word "Cut" with your Left mouse button
  • The folder you selected will appear fainter
  • Now, Double Click the folder you want to move your new folder into, or select one from the list on the left hand side. In our case that's the "My Documents" folder. So Click the "My Documents" folder
  • Once in the "My Documents" folder, From the File, Edit, View, Go menu bar in Windows Explorer click Edit
  • From the menu that drops down, click Paste
  • Your folder will be pasted from your root folder on the C drive into your My Documents folder

Instead of cutting the folder and pasting, you can just Copy the folder instead. To copy the folder instead of cutting, follow the steps outlined above, but when the menus drop down select "Copy". Then select "Paste" after you have double clicked on the My Documents folders. Everything we've said about about folders also applies. In other words, you can rename a file like you did above, you can copy a file, move it with drag and drop or cut and paste, and you can even create a file with Windows Explorer. Just click on File from the sub menu and select New. You'll see a list of software packages that you can create new files for.


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