How Do Hard Drives Work? is a new TED-Ed lesson about a piece of technology that students utilize every day, but often don’t understand. The lesson begins with an explanation of the physical components of a hard drive. The lesson then progresses to explain how data is stored. The explanation of bits and bytes is the part of the lesson that students will probably hear and think, “oh, that’s what that means.”

Besides the explanation of how hard drives work, this lesson does a good job of illustrating how technology improves over time and what that means for future technology development and use.