Read Head

In hard drives, the read head is the component that converts the magnetism on the disk‘s surface into an electrical data signal in order to retrieve the data. The head “flies” or floats a very small distance above the disk surface — as close as three nanometers above. Early read heads were very similar to the heads found in tape recorders, consisting of a coil of wire wrapped around ferrite. Technology has advanced (and continues to advance) to where heads can now read extremely dense fields of data from the disk, with high stability and reliability.