Wednesday, April 1, 2015

How to select your Hard Drives

How to select your Hard Drives
Image Courtesy: CC0 Public Domain
(Free for commercial use / No attribution required)
The hard disk or drive is an important part of a computer. It stores the all important data and the essential operating system files. New versions of upgraded and improved hard drives with more storage space are getting launched almost every day. Selecting the right hard drive for your system is often tricky and requires some understanding of the system.

Working principle of a hard drive

The hard drives consist of numerous magnetized platters that are linked to a spindle, which spins the platters at high speed. At the same time various read and write heads scan the platters for required information. The information is then transferred to the hard drive controller and subsequently to the computer. The performance of a hard drive, thus depends on the amount of unused area, fragmentation or data arrangement and the data transfer rate (depends on spin rate and connection).

Types of Hard Drives

Internal: The hard drive placed inside your computer. 

External: This is the exact prototype of the internal hard drive kept inside a protective case. This is ideal to store and back up important data and good for people who need to transfer huge amount data.
Hard Drives for laptops: Functionally hard drives for laptops are exact copy of the desktop ones. But, they are compact in size to fit in laptops. Always check the compatibility of the hard drives with your system before buying.

Size: The size of the hard drive is critical as more size will give you more freedom of storage. Before upgrading the size of your hard drive, always make sure whether your system will support it or not. Nowadays, computers usually come with a minimum of 500 GB hard drive and 1 TB is quite common. You may consider buying two 500 GB hard drives instead of one of 1 TB. But, the price will be more for two 500 GB hard drives and the hard drives are usually robust enough to last for long years. So it is better to go for the cheaper option.

Interface: The connectivity of the hard drive with your computer is an essential aspect that needs to be considered before buying it. There are various types of interface available such as IDE or Integrated Drive Electronics (ATA Types); SCSI or Small Computer System Interface (SCSI Types); IEEE 1394 or Firewire (can connect 63 devices at a time); USB 1.1 or Universal Serial Bus (at a time can connect up to 127 devices, with transfer rate 1.5 MB/Sec); USB 2.0 (Can transfer at 60 MB/Sec); USB 3.0 (can transfer at 640 MB/Sec) and Fibre Channel (allows transfer over a long distance through cables at transfer rate of 106 MB/Sec).

Other things to be considered are spin rate (rate of data transfer that is a key factor for your computer performance), cache (the temporary memory acting as a buffer between the hard drive and your computer), seek time (the time taken by the hard drive to locate a precise track on the disk), external and internal transfer rate (the speed at which the drive reads and passes data) and self monitoring analysis and reporting technology (the ability of the drive to alert you regarding any possible malfunction).

So, before buying a hard drive, you have to look at various technical aspects that will help you to get the perfect hard drive matching your system. The price and after sell service are also important aspects to be considered.

How to select your Hard Drives
Image Courtesy: CC0 Public Domain
(Free for commercial use / No attribution required)

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