Hard Drive

Hard drives are the main storage device used for data storage in computers and robots.

Usually computers use a firmware that requires some hard drive to complete the boot process. See the flash memory entry for more details. The RISC-V Linux requires a root file system that goes with its firmware. One may be obtained by crafting an 8M hard drive together with a RISC-V processor, which writes that root file system to the drive.

Crafting the result with a wrench wipes it back to an empty drive.

Computers have to be shut down before installing or removing this component. Installing it while the computer is running will have no effect, removing it may lead to system errors.

Storage media are not perfect, and a drive left unused for a long time may suffer from bit rot and lose its contents. Format corrupted drives using the wrench. Interestingly, this only seems to happen when there are a lot of storage devices in the world.