PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect ) bus is 32/64 bit wide.The interface used to connect a hard disk to PC is called IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics). IDE connector has 40 pins and pin 1 is identified by a stripe on the cable. Position 20 is blocked in IDE connector to prevent improper plugging.

HD has 4 pin power connector similar to that of floppy drive. Most of the HD uses both 5 V (for electronic circuitry) and 1 V for the spindle motor and head actuator. HDs have one or more logic boards mounted on them. They control the drive's spindle and head actuator systems. HD has Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of 300,000 to one million. SMART (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) provide failure protection for HD.

Preparing a hard disk for storage : Low level formatting (physical formatting), partitioning and High level formatting (logical formatting). During low level formatting, tracks are divided into sectors, creating the inter sector and inter track gaps and recording the sector header and trailer information.