|
|
Viewing What Are They Anyway? The Hard Truth About Hard DrivesWhat Are They Anyway? The Hard Truth About Hard Drives
By Andrew Watson
|
The computer world is going places. From room-sized processors to palm tops, everything seems to have revolutionized. As computers decrease in size and increase in complexity, one area that merits constant attention is hard drives. The computer world is going places. From room-sized processors to palm tops, everything seems to have revolutionized. As computers decrease in size and increase in complexity, one area that merits constant attention is hard drives. What are hard drives anyway? What makes them so important? Let us investigate hard drives and their characteristics one by one. Hard drives are the primary storage devices of a computer. All data generated by us is saved on these hard disks as electromagnetic information. A drive is actually made up of platters. Read-write heads rotate over platters to write information on them. The four main characteristics of a hard drive are The higher the number of platters, the higher the storage capacity. However, more platters often means more seek time and hence slower speeds. Recently, data storage underwent a major change with the invention of terabyte drives. These drives are revolutionary, because they store data using perpendicular magnetic recording, which allocates data more judiciously. Hard drives in the 3.5' form factor typically have a height of 1', which is sufficient to accommodate up to five platters inside the drive. Notebook hard drives use single or twin platter designs and adhere to 9.5 mm or 12.5 mm height limits, though the latter is not suitable for most notebook designs. You may have one hard drive already, but may need another for many reasons like: 3.5' Desktop Hard Drives To understand hard drives in depth, we must first understand the credentials of a hard drive. Standard hard drives for desktops utilize the 3.5' form factor, which refers to the width of the drive. There are models with UltraATA interface or Serial ATA. The latter is more advanced, offers better bandwidth, and is much easier to add to your PC, as you do not have to configure the hard drives. Two UltraATA drives have to share one port (referred to as channels), while one serves as a so-called master drive and the other as a slave drive. 3.5' hard drives are available at capacities from 40 GB to one terabyte. Performance is determined by the recording technology and the rotation speed, but it is safe to say that the current product generations are clearly faster than their predecessors were. The major brand characteristics are: Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 currently is the world's largest desktop hard drive. Its five platters spin at 7,200 RPM, and the drive carries 32 MB cache memory. Hitachi uses a Serial ATA/300 interface to communicate with the host system. The drive's performance is excellent, but it is not the performance champion. Other 7,200-RPM drives perform similarly well, and there still is Western Digital's 10,000 RPM Raptor drive, which delivers much quicker access time. Western Digital's WD5000KS Caviar SE (standing for Special Edition) competes directly against Samsung's Spinpoint T166, which also offers 7,200 RPM and 16 MB cache memory. Its transfer rates are no match for the Samsung drive, but the access time and I/O performance is clearly quicker. According to the datasheets, the WD5000KS also requires less energy than the Samsung T166, but the Hitachi T7K500 is even more efficient. The WD1600AAJS is interesting, because it offers 160 GB storage capacity on a single platter. This ensures very low heat dissipation, quiet acoustics, and few moving parts that suffer from wear and tear. It has 8 MB cache, uses a Serial ATA/300 interface, and spins at 7,200 RPM. In addition, this drive starts at only $50 and has a three-year warranty. Maxtor: The two major hard drives offered by Maxtor are diamond max 9 and 10. Like its predecessor, the DiamondMax 10 has a 150MB/sec Serial ATA interface and spins at 7,200 RPM. The drive's seek time and rotational latency are a little faster than the Plus 9, but not by much. The DiamondMax 10 does manage to pack an additional 20GB or storage per platter, though. Additional cache is one of the DiamondMax 10's more notable features, but it is limited to the largest drives. 250 and 300 GB DiamondMax 10 drives come with 16 MB of cache - twice what is available with 80, 120, 160, and 200 GB drives. Seagate may not be able to compete with Hitachi with its terabyte offering, but it was the first hard drive maker to offer a 750 GB drive. The Barracuda 7200.10 still is a huge and fast hard drive, and it is available with both UltraATA and Serial ATA/300 interfaces. Seagate is the only drive maker to offer a full five-year warranty Samsung's Spinpoint T166 currently is one of the cheapest 500 GB Serial ATA hard drives. It carries 16 MB cache, and offers exceptionally high transfer rates. It comes with a three-year warranty. The sweetest part, however, is the low price tag. The Spinpoint T166 utilizes only three instead of four platters to store the 500 GB, which results in less heat dissipation and slightly less noise as well. Conclusion Now you have an idea about which brand offers which drive, and which is more suitable. However, this knowledge is not sufficient until you know how to maintain our drives. Therefore, some important points in this regard are mentioned below. Data on the hard drives may be lost due to a number of reasons like virus attacks, hardware malfunction, software backfire, or sabotage. Since we may not be able to find out the cause of our lost or inaccessible data, it is better that we approach professionals. These data recovery organizations are often equipped with class 100 labs and technicians who can lift data from even severely damaged drives. Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software can recover all your lost, deleted, inaccessible data in cases of logical damages, while technicians at their clean rooms can recover data from physically damaged drives. Computing can be fun if you follow some basic rules of hardware maintenance. You must pay attention to any unusual noises from your system and watch out for unusually slow speed, etc. Hard drives are an intricate network of components. Therefore, you must never try to doctor your drives. Knowing the basic features of major drives can enable you to figure out the best purchase, and thus allow for confident product purchases. While buying drives you must always weigh your options well. Article Source: 1st Rate Articles - http://1stRateArticles.com |
|