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A hard
dive or hard disk drive (HDD) is the storage site for information.
The data on a hard drive is non-volatile means when the power goes
off your data still remains intact. The data on a drive is stored on
magnetic plates arranged in the form of layers, one over the other.
There
are a variety of factors that determine the performance of a hard
drive for example capacity, power consumption, G-shock rating, rpm,
data rate and seek time. The capacity and seek time of a hard drive
is of prime importance if you are interested in gaming. For a gamer
or a normal home user anything having a storage capacity 200
gigabyte or above is enough. In case you want to store a lot of DVD
movies you definitely look for 200 gigabytes or above. There are
even drives available in the market having many terabytes of
capacity, but they are recommended for servers. Power consumption by
hard drives is only an issue in notebooks. There has been a drastic
improvements in the seek time department, the newer hard drives have
much less seek time, less than 12 milliseconds. Some hard drive
manufactures have introduced caching mechanism to improve the
performance of the drive.
With
the improvement in the processor and memory performance the
architecture of the hard drives is also changing. Hard drive can be
connected to the motherboard through different interfaces for
example SCSI, ATA/IDE and SATA. SATA drives are getting more popular
because of their better data rates; these drives offer “serial
communication” instead of traditional parallel interface.
There
are different hard drive manufacturers available in the market. In
the desktop environment Western Digital is recognized as a industry
leader. |
