All about your Mac's Hard drive that you must know

In this article, we will have an indepth analysis of a hard drive. We will see thr details of its working principle, health maintenance and filesystems.

The hard drive is a place, where all your data is stored and are considered to be most important piece of hardware in your computer. If your hard drive behaves weired or stop working it could be quite dangerous for your data stored in it. Infact most of the computer problems are encountered from your hard drive, so its crucial to maintain your hard drive health.

There are two types of hard drives: HDD(Hard disk drives) and SSD(Solid- State drives). Both perform same task but differently.

How (HDD) hard disk drive works:

Hard drive perform read and write operations by changing the magnetic polarities on the drive. Any magnetic direction change when head passes over drive that lead to voltage spike and creating a 1. And there will be no change in voltage spikes when magnetic direction is same, so it creates 0.

How SSD works:

Solid State Drives are becoming more popular because of increasing number of portable devices and more advanced technology it has. Non -Retina is the only laptop of Apple that don't have flash storage. Unlike HDD that deliver data rely on a spinning platter, SSD due to absence of moving parts it stores data inside transistors or gates in the form of electrical charges. In the presence of a charge it produces 1 and in absence 0.

Comparison between HDD and SSD: HDD are cheaper, easier to damage and can hold more data comparatively SSD. While, SSD is expensive, perform faster read operation than HDD as no time consumes in waiting for platter to spin up. However SSD can't hold much data as HDD.

Fusion Drive: A fusion drive as the name describe is a mixture of both an SSD and a hard disk drive. So, if you have fusion drive in your computer means your computer has two separate drives, but only one drive will be visible to you. And intersting thing is OS X automatically decides that in which drive to store files depending on how much you use drive.

Maintenance of Mac hard drive: Your Mac drive will degrade in health with the passage of time. But, using some techniques you can maintain your hard drive and increase life of your drive.

S.M.A.R.T -­-­- smarter choice of S.M.A.R.T people

Your Mac drive comes with a tool called S.M.A.R.T that diagnose your drive for any sort of problems and reports you, if find any issue. So ,it is quite safe to check SMART status of your drive regularly so that one can take an appropriate action before any mishappening.

SMART(Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Report Technology) will let you know before occuring of any problem by sending several warning messages.

For Verifying Health of of your Mac drive:

Opens Mac Disk Utility

Select Mac HD in left hand pane

Click Verify Disk for verifying your disk

After complete it will let you know if found any problems in its log file, then click Repair Disk for fixing those problems.

Mac drive Formatting: Formatting hard drive refers to how your data is represented or stores in OS. There are three common filesystems:HFS+, FAT32 and NTFS.

Mac OS X filesystem is HFS+, while Windows user uses NTFS and used to use FAT32 also.
Below chart showing that these filesystem compatible with which operating system.

	HFS+	FAT32	NTFS
WINDOWS	Read Only	Read and Write	Read and Write
Mac OS X	Read and Write	Read and Write	Read Only

Now, one may think that when FAT32 is cross platform then why not we format our Mac drive using FAT32. This is because of the reason of its limitation in size of the file, while it have larger capacity but can't have files larger than 4GB on the disk.

Note: Before doing formatting you need to create bootable copy Mac OS X  in order to protect your data from any loss during such operation. So, remember to clone your drive before formatting your Mac drive or its partitions.