Hard Drives 
        
WEBQuest
 

Brief  Description:

A friend has asked you if you could fix her teachers computer. You said "SURE, I'm a master at fixing PC's"!  However, after using your expertise, you have discovered that the teachers hard drive has crashed.  You can not recover the teachers data, and the teacher must buy a new hard drive.  Neither your friend nor the teacher, seems to believe that you new what you were doing, in fact, it seems that they suspect that you may have crashed it.  WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?  

Objectives:

You will be doing research on how a hard drive works so that you can DAZZLE your friend and the teacher about your knowledge about hard drives.  This DAZZLE, will convince them that you new what you were doing. 

Resources: 

1. How Hard Drives work:  http://www.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk.htm 

2. Hard Drives:  http://pcsupport.about.com/od/componentprofiles/p/p_hdd.htm

3. Hard drive problems: http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-010355.htm  

4. Disaster Recovery: http://www.disaster-recovery-guide.com/  &  http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci752089,00.html  

The resources found in the room and on the internet

Tasks :

     TASK 1:  Answer the following questions,  put the question and the answer on a separate document.  Title the document Hard disks and be sure to put your name at the top.

  1. When were hard disks invented?
  2. What size, in inches, was some of the first hard drives?
  3. Why were they call hard disks?
  4. What is data rate?
  5. What is seek time?
  6. How fast might the platter spin?
  7.  Why do they use multiple platters?
  8. What is a sector?
  9. What is a track?
  10. What is a cluster?
  11. What is the difference between low level and high level formatting?
  12. Why does the OS Win95 limit the hard drive size? (see resource 3)
  13. What is the hard drive partition limit for windows 95?
  14. Can the BIOS limit the size? How?
  15. Is a 2 GB hard Drive exactly 2GB?  Explain?
  16. Describe a hard drive crash/ unusual noises? (see resource 4)
  17. Describe power outages / surges?
  18. Describe what water and fire damage can do?
  19. Describe how viruses can damage a hard disk?
  20. What are the various FAT types? (There are at least 4 (don't forget NT method of partitioning))
  21. What does formatting do?
  22.  Describe some back-up methods!  

     TASK 2:   Create a power point about Hard disks.  Print it 3 slide to a page. The following are just some THEMES that you can use:

Assessment:

You will be graded on the answers to you questions and the quality of your presentation.