A computer is composed of many parts. One of the most important elements is the hard drive, which is, essentially, the command center of the personal computer. Hard drives store all sorts of information such as the operating system, boot logs, applications, and even the exact time at which you read your email yesterday. In this guide, you will learn about the history of hard drives as well as their role in the computing ecosystem, and some suggestions as to what you should be looking for in an internal hard drive.
The hard drive dates back to the early nineteen fifties, when computing was inconvenient. At this point, computers did not have any sort of storage medium. Instead, you had to manually enter a program each time that you wanted to perform a task. Permanent storage was utterly necessary if computers were to become remotely useful to us. The first type of immutable storage was paper; holes that represented data were punched into cards that were read by a special reader. This sort of medium, however, also became inconvenient because the paper tended to jam in the reader. Then data was stored on magnetic tape akin to how audio is recorded. The problem with magnetic tape was that if you wanted data at the end of the tape, you had to scan through the entire tape to retrieve it. After magnetic tape came floppy disks, which were an improvement, but not particularly advantageous. Soon after, in 1956, researchers at IBM created the first commercial hard drive - it was 50 disks that were each 24 inches in diameter and held 5 megabytes. Over the next several decades, technology improved to what it is today. We now have large capacity drives in a small form factor that quickly retrieve data. But what do hard drives truly do?
Within the computer ecosystem, the individual components each play their part in making the personal computer function. The CPU, or Central Processing Unit, for example, is an electronic device that executes programs. Hard drives, as previously noted, are storage mediums for digitally encoded data. A hard drive uses rotating magnetic platters that are read by a floating head to function.
While searching for internal hard drives to purchase, there are many factors to consider. These aspects include capacity, size, speed, interface, and price. Capacity is the amount of data a hard drive can hold; currently, this ranges from about sixty gigabytes to two terabytes. Hard drives typically come in two sizes: 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch. 2.5 inch drives are for laptop computers, whereas 3.5 inch drives are used in desktops. Drive speed determines how fast data can be written or retrieved; this is measured in rotations per minute. Today, the average drive speed for desktops is 7200 rpm, whereas for laptops it is 5400 rpm. The current limit is 10,000 rpm; these are aimed at business users that need the additional speed. There are two interface standards that are widely used. The newest and fastest is called SATA, which supports transfer rates of up to 300 megabytes per second. PATA is the older and slightly slower interface; it has a maximum transfer rate of 133 megabytes per second. Lastly, price is a major consideration. If you do not have $300 to spend on a new drive, then don't spend it. The largest 2 TB drives can be obtained for a little over a hundred dollars with careful shopping, so no matter what your budget may be, you can be most certain that you will obtain the drive that you are looking for.
Source : www.goarticles.com by Matthew Kerridge
0 comments:
Post a Comment