What Does a Hard Drive Look Like? [Inside/Internal/External]

About Hard Drive

According to Wikipedia, a hard drive disk (HDD), also known as a hard drive, hard disk or fixed disk, is an electronic and mechanical data storage device. It makes use of magnetic storage to save and retrieve digital data relying on one or more rigid quickly rotating platters covered with magnetic material. And, the platters are paired with magnetic heads, which is usually installed on a moving actuator arm. The magnetic heads are used to read data from the platter surfaces as well as write data to the platters.

After reading the basic introduction to a common hard drive, now, you probably have a general image of the shape of a hard disk in your mind.

Related article: What Is Hard Disk? Comparisons Among SSD, HDD and SSHD 

What Does a Hard Drive Look Like? – Inside a Hard Drive

Does the hard drive in the above picture match your imagination? Or, how much your imaged hard disk drive matches the image in the picture? Anyhow, it doesn’t matter whether you have imaged the right portrait of a hard disk nor not. Now, you know what it really looks like of its inside.

Usually, we do not tear a good hard drive apart just for seeing what it looks like. The most situations are that when a hard disk has a problem and it is fixable, a professional will take the cover off and do the fixing. Then, you can see what the hard drive looks like inside.

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What Does a Hard Drive Look Like? – Outside

After knowing the inside look of a disk, you may wonder what does the hard drive look like outside. Fewer people may have this question for most computer users who have seen the appearance of a hard drive during their journey with computer usage. Yet, the appearance of an internal hard drive is a little different from an external hard drive. Let’s take a look at them.

What Does the Internal Hard Drive Look Like?

Usually, you can view the internal hard disk just by uncovering your desktop host cover and removing the hard disk drive from the computer tower. Yet, if it’s a laptop (e.g. Dell laptop), what does a laptop hard drive look like? Similarly, just unscrew the location from the back of a laptop where the hard drive is installed and pull out the internal disk to view its appearance.

Or, if you just want to know how general hard drives look like, you can just search online and view the pictures from online resellers (Amazon, AliExpress, eBay, etc.), hard disk manufacturer official websites, tech reviews, tech forums and many other places.

Anyhow, in general, an internal hard drive just looks like in below picture or similar. The other brands or models have a similar shape but different color or interface picture.

What Does an External Hard Drive Look Like?

Finally, let’ look at the outward of a normal external hard disk. Since external drives are wrapped by plastic cases (usually black) for security, they are nearly the same in appearance ignoring the color, manufacturer logo, size (slight difference), tags and some other factors that are not easy to detect for a glance.

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OK, that is all about what does a hard drive look like. Hope this review post gives you the information you are looking for.