Until they are written over. If you delete 5 files, for example, they will stay on your computer until the space that the files added to your drive is taken up again. Then the files will be permanently gone.
as long as theres enough room on the smaller hard drive...then yes..
Yes, as long the hard disk drive is not NTFS formatted.
a long time its hard to drive alot
depends on the type of drive, but as long as the drive is kept away from magnets and at the proper temperature and humidity it should last a decade or two.
Yes. Operating systems can read any hard drive (as long as the drive is not corrupt)
An analogy for the hard drive in a human body is the brain's ability to remember things over the long term and the ability to remember them at any moment in time, a bit like uploading them from storage to RAM, so that you are thinking of them.
Yes as long as the hard drive has its own power supply and not powered by the USB port.
Well it can vary between high speed SATA or high speed IDE hard drives. They all link into a port on the side or middle of a motherboard. an IDE hard drive is a hard drive with a long rectangular outlet or hookup to the motherboard. A SATA hard drive is a small but reliable plug to the motherboard about half an inch long.
hard disk drive
No it does not. As long as the motherboard has the proper connectors for the hard drive you are installing, IDE or SATA, you will not have to replace it. If the connectors are different, then return the hard drive and get one with the proper connection type.
The hard drive is the computer's long-term memory. Our brains use different methods to remember things we want kept for a long time, like our names and the names of our family members, than remembering to carry the one in a math problem. It is effectively the same for computers. A computer will 'write' things down on the hard drive to remember them long-term. The Random Access Memory(RAM) a computer has is what it would use in the above math example, instead of the hard drive. When your computer is starting up when you first turn it on, it is remembering all the things it 'wrote' down that you want to be able to use, like, say, Windows XP. XP will stay in the computer's RAM while you are logged in and using it, as will any programs you start, like, say, Internet Explorer. All these must have been 'written' down first in the hard drive. The reason I use the quotes around 'write' is that hard drive use actual metal disks (hence them also being called hard disks, or hard disk drives) and they store information by very, very precise use of magnets and magnetic fields.
Restoring files on a hard drive can always be done as long as the hard drive itself isn't irrepairably damaged physically. If you are able to replace that hard drive with the hard drive in another computer and boot it up, you should be able to roll back the hard drive to a different restore point where everything was accessable.