Hard Disk Drives

ATA is the current standard, it uses regular molex power connectors and IDE cables. SATA is a newer product (also SATA2 is already in development) - it is faster than ATA and uses different cables - much thinner and neater. Also take into consideration the RPM of the drive, 5400 is a bit slow, 7200 is good, 10,000 is fast but can be quite noisy. Servers generally use 10k rpm SCSI hard drives, but SCSI is unusual in home computers. Most motherboards only have IDE connections and so can only take ATA, you would need a new motherboard for SATA hard drives. The capacity that you need is simply dependant on how much you plan on saving to your hard-drive. Usually from 40GB upwards Types of Hard Disk Drives

Speeds of Hard Disk Drives Rotate at 7,200 or 10,000 revolutions per minute (RPM) and have a sequential media transfer rate of over 80 MB/s. The fastest enterprise HDDs spin at 15,000 rpm, and can achieve sequential media transfer speeds above 110 MB/s. Mobile, i.e., Laptop HDDs, which are physically smaller than their desktop and enterprise counterparts, tend to be slower and have less capacity. In the 1990s, most spun at 4,200 rpm. In 2007, a typical mobile HDD spins at 5,400 rpm, with 7,200 rpm models available for a slight price premium.

Capacities of Hard Disk Drives In modern times, there are many different sized hard drives. There are may different types of capacities for both internal and external. A MAC Hard Disk Drive can start from as low as 10Gb, then both windows and MAC Hard Drives have many different sizes, such as 20GB, 40GB, 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB, 400GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB. External Hard Drives can consist of up to 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB, 400GB and 500.

Different Connections of Hard Disk Drives An internal hard drive has to be connected to many different devices in a computer. The hard drive has to be connected to the motherboard, as well as the slave device, and the primary device. An external hard drive is connected just like a pen drive, through any USB Port on the computer unit

How Hard Disk Drives Perform They usually would read and write data. They are basically thought by many people to be an object that stores data. There are quite a few ways how to measure and discuss performance rate. It depends how the person uses the computer. Something called a performance factor is used to determine how good the hard drive is when it comes to performance. The higher the factor, the better. To get a good one is to buy it at a fair price, or sacrifice it for diversities such as storage/capacity limit, flexibility. Most HDD’s tend to perform much better than older models, so you are much better off purchasing a new one, if your old one is about 5 years old. Things like loading speed, applications, reading data and overwriting data are times when the HDD is used in processing power. References for first sentence

Created by: Mark Harrison Samuel Cheung Luke Shilleto Nural Amin