What are Platters?

A round magnetic plate that constitutes a part of hard disk. Hard disks contain dozen of platters. Most platters require two read/write heads that is coated in a magnetic media which is located within a hard disk drive and used to permanently store all your computers data. When the computer is turned on the platter will start rotating at the speed of 1000 rotations per minute (RPM). This rate varies depending upon the model of hard drive you have, an example of how fast a hard drive may spin is 7200 RPM.

A platter is a component of a hard disk drive, which may have one or more hard disk platters. A thin layer of either iron oxide or another material that possesses magnetic properties coats each side of a hard disk platter.

There may be bad spots which are normally found on the platter, which are fixed by reformatting the hard drive. There may be some type of electrical connection problem: Make sure the cable connections are correct. Check the 4-wire connector that carries power and makes sure it is properly plugged in. This connector has a taper on one end and cannot be put on backwards. When power is first applied to the computer, the hard drive light will momentarily come on which is a good indication that the drive is getting power.

Also the vibration of the spinning platter and the slight hum will verify that the drive is plugged in. Next check the data ribbon cable. This cable is a flat cable with a one edge colored red or blue to indicate the location of pin 1. Some of these cables are also keyed by having a small tab in the center of the connector's edge. On many hard drives pin 1 is the pin closest to the power supply connection, but not always, so check the hard drive documentation or look on this site in Hard Drives and locate your model.

You can find hard drive documentation on this site simply by using the index on top of each page to find the manufacturer and then on the manufacturers page will be a listing which would have links to each product and the technical support documents. If the drive is not spinning then it is probably bad. The hard drive controller has failed or the controller failure is usually indicated by an error at boot up.

The hard drive has failed physically There can be two indications for this condition. The drive is not spinning. To troubleshoot this condition you need to physically access the drive while the computer is on. With the cover off, look at the drive and find the side which has no components. With your hand touch that side and try to feel the spinning of the hard drive platter. A typical hard drive has a small amount of vibration and a slight whine.

The hard drive head has crashed onto the platter. This usually causes the drive to emit unusual sounds sometimes grinding and many times repeating on a regular basis. A normal hard drive has a smooth whine so it should be easy to identify the bad drive by just listening.

Since, the platter is the part of the hard disk and is responsible for holding data. The companies are making the platter high performance and more durable so there may be less changes of losing the data when even the hard disk crashes.

Related Information:

Find software and applications helpful in data recovery for unbootable hard drive

Find out ways where data recovery from terabyte raid is possible

Outlook express auto archive recovery deleted email

Looking for WordPerfect file recovery software, click here

Data recovery services for Fullerton drive data recovery

Data Recovery Software - RAID Recovery

More Information
Disk Boot Error
Data Corruption Hard Disk
Data Recovery Hard Disk
Defragmentation
Fat-16-32
Hard Disk Bad Sectors
Hard Disk Bios Setup
Hard Disk Comparision
Hard Disk Data Bus
Hard Disk Formatting
Hard Drives Buying Guide
Hard Disk Installation Tool
Hard Disk Partition
Hard Disk Secondary Storage Hard Disk Technology
Hard Disk Troubleshooting
Large Disk Support
Low Level Format
Non Dos Partition
NTFS
Partitioning Software
Permanently Data Removal
Resizing Nobbled Hard Disk
scandisk
Data Security - Hard Disk

Related Information
Computer Store
Tape Data Recovery
Data Recovery Canada
Business Intelligence
Document Management