how does a hardrive work?

Answer:

How roughly a video that will show and explain it all :)



http://www.collegeafterhours.com/index.p...
It rotates the platters at a enormously fast speed over read/write head that can retrieve or create new background using magnetism.
"At the simplest smooth, a hard disk is not that different from a cassette video. Both hard disks and cassette tape use the same captivating recording technique described in How Tape Recorders Work. Hard disks and cassette tape also share the major benefits of fascinating storage -- the magnetic surrounding substance can be easily erased and rewritten, and it will "remember" the captivating flux patterns stored onto the prevailing conditions for many years.



Data is stored on the surface of a platter within sectors and tracks. Tracks are concentric circles, and sector are pie-shaped wedges on a track.



A typical track is shown within yellow; a typical sector is shown contained by blue. A sector contains a fixed number of bytes -- for example, 256 or 512. Either at the drive or the operating system level, sector are often grouped together into clusters.



The process of low-level formatting a drive establishes the tracks and sector on the platter. The starting and ending points of respectively sector are written onto the platter. This process prepares the drive to hold blocks of bytes. High-level formatting then writes the file-storage structures, similar to the file-allocation table, into the sectors. This process prepares the drive to hold files." from Howstuffworks. Link is below.