Types of Hard Drives
Internal Hard Drives
Parallel ATA (PATA) or IDE
Serial ATA (SATA)
SCSI
External Hard Drives
USB
Firewire
eSATA
SCSI
Traditional or Platter Based Hard Drive – is a data storage device that uses platters to store data.
Solid State Drive – is a data storage device that uses solid state memory to store data.
NVME - Non-Volatile Memory Express Drive
Hybrid - SSD/HDD Combo Drive
When buying a hard drive what do you look for?
Capacity: 300GB typical hard drive storage but can go up to 100TB
RPM rotation per minute: 15,000, 10,000rpm, 7,200rpm, 5,400rpm
(the higher the RPM the faster the spin)
Seek time: 12ms, 9ms, and 4.7ms (the lower the ms the faster) the lower the number the better the latency
Buffer: 12MB, 8MB, 4MB, and 2MB (the higher the number the better for temporary storage)
Hard Drive Transfer Speed:
Parallel ATA (PATA) 33, 66, 100 and 133MB/s
Firewire 400, 800, 1600 and 3200Mbps
Serial ATA (SATA) 150MB/s, 300MB/s , 600MB/s
USB 480Mbps and 4.8Gbps
SCSI comes in 33MB/s, 150MB/s, 300MB/s and 640MB/s
Hard drive Manufacturers: Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Maxtor, Fujitzu, Samsung
Hard Drive Geometry:
AUTO Detect
LBA (504MB)
E/CHS (8.4GB)
Phoenix Interrupt 13th Requests (137GB)
Hard Drive Components
Traditional vs. Solid State Drives
Platter - The actual fixed disk within the hard disk drive
Heads - Each side of a platter
Tracks - Large sections that completely circle the platter
Sector - Section on the track
Cylinder – The same diameter of tracks on each platter
Cluster – The smallest unit of measurement in a hard drive
Hard drive utilities – Scandisk, Defrag and Disk Cleanup
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