Bill’s back! And his subject this week may be the ultimate example of a truly astounding piece of engineering that we all tend to take for granted: The computer hard drive. A favorite college physics professor once admitted to me that the hard disk drive impressed him more than almost any other single piece of modern technology, and I have since found that, the more I think about it, the more I agree with him. As always, Bill Hammack does a great job of explaining things in a way that will appeal to both experts and amateurs. [Thanks, Bill!]

BY Sean Michael Ragan

I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I write for MAKE, serve as Technical Editor for MAKE magazine, and develop original DIY content for Make: Projects.

5 Responses to Engineer Guy vs The Computer Hard Drive

  1. I love the videos this guy makes.  Even his “non-engineery” videos, like the “why it takes so long to wait in line at a supermarket” are fun.

  2. Anonymous on said:

    Absolutely delightful!  Mr Hammack does a wonderful job, (particularly with the animation).  I had no idea that both positive and negative spikes were “1″s.  Surprising that they never considered using trinary for even more data density.

    I hope you’re getting your cut of all the vast profits from the “cooking for geeks” sales, Bill [wink]

  3. Anonymous on said:

    Absolutely delightful!  Mr Hammack does a wonderful job, (particularly with the animation).  I had no idea that both positive and negative spikes were “1″s.  Surprising that they never considered using trinary for even more data density.

    I hope you’re getting your cut of all the vast profits from the “cooking for geeks” sales, Bill [wink]

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: