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Types of Hard Drives

hard drive

Internal Hard Drives                                           

Parallel ATA (PATA) or IDE                                            
Serial ATA (SATA) 
SCSI   

scsi      

External Hard Drives

USB
Firewire
eSATA
SCSI

usb hd   

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

platter vs solid state

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

hd geometry


Hard drive utilities – Scandisk, Defrag and Disk Cleanup