What Is A Hard Drive
A hard drive or sometimes referred to hard disk drive is the computer component where all you information is saved upon. This makes is the most important component that your PC will have inside depending upon the value and the type of information you have. All programs, emails, pictures, music and even Windows itself is loaded and saved onto the hard drive. Hard Drives are measured in Gigabytes, abbreviated to GB’s and are most commonly referred to as Gigs. The more Gigabytes or Gigs in your hard drive the more information you can store on to your PC. SIMPLE
What Size is a Hard Drive?
Physically, a hard drive is 3.5’’ wide which is why it finds into a 3.5’’ bay inside all computer casings. Electronically, hard Drives normally tend to start from a minimum of 40 Gigabytes and can even range to 1000 Gigabytes. 1000 Gigabytes is known as 1 Terabyte.
An average entry level computer from the high street has an 80 Gigabyte hard drive in it which allows a person to save around 60,000 photos, 20,000 music files and or 15 complete DVD quality movies. Other hard Drive sizes are 120GB, 160GB, 200GB, 250GB, 300GB, 320GB, 400GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1000GB.As mentioned the bigger your hard drive the more information you can save on your PC. A typical Hard Drive is shown below.
What Are The Different Types of Hard Drives?
Hard drives have two common types of interfaces. ATA and S-ATA. S-ATA is also referred to as SATA (Pronounced exactly as it’s written) Finally it has another name known as Serial-ATA. These all mean the same. To make it a bit more humorous ATA is more commonly known as IDE and PATA. LETS NOT GET CONFUSED.
In essence, there are to main type’s hard drive. IDE and SATA. IDE is the previous yet still widely used interface whilst SATA is the newest interface of hard drives. The only difference is that SATA is about 10% faster than IDE. SATA is also slightly easy to install on a computer and has smaller cables to connect inside the PC.
My Hard Drive Only Has Information On It, Does It Need To Be Fast?
The standard speed of a hard drive is 7200 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute). This speed it suitable for standard home or business use. Though a small percentage of people whom either have too much money or really need the most speed that they can get(such as Video Editors) for them is the Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM hard drives. The reason why this 10,000 RPM makes a huge difference is that ultimately all programs and data is stored on the hard drive. SO, when ever you’re doing anything on your computer may it be surfing the internet or playing games, the computer is requesting information from the hard drive. Thus the Hard drive is the working all the time. However stuck at the standard 7200 RPM it can only do so much in a given time frame. So to break this barrier the raptors spin at a staggering 10,000 RPM which makes a huge amount of difference. However this difference comes at a price. A 10,000 RPM hard drive is normally twice the amount of a 7200 RPM hard drive of its same size. So if you want real speed and can afford it, then the RAPTORS is your best choice. The Raptors only come in 3 sizes or 36GB, 72GB and 150GB. It is normally advised to save your programs on the RAPTOR to increase the performance of the PC and to purchase a secondary hard drive if you have a lot of information such as Music and Videos.
What If My Hard Drive Stops Working?
If your hard drive goes faulty, as in works one day and doesn’t the next (Which they most definitely tend to do) then it would be correct to say that you have lost any information that existed on your computer. To make it even worse it is either lost forever or you can not take your computer to a local repair shop to fix it as it is too much of a specialist job to do so. However you would have to contact data recovery specialists who will charge you the earth to get your data back. This normally applies to businesses wherein the information on a PC could be financial data or data of extreme value as oppose to family photos or just general music CDs that a typical house hold computer might have.
SEAGATE hard drives tend to be the most reliable hard drive on the market, backed with a standard 5 year warranty we recommend them as a first choice in terms or reliability. DO KEEP IN MIND, the hard drive manufacture regardless of the brand, will always warranty their component and nothing else. This means they will not be liable for any information lost if the hard drive was to seize.
So How Can I Keep My Information Safe?
Well, in true honesty you can never trust a PC component no matter how new or old it is. It is always advised to do at least a monthly backup of a home PC and a pretty much a daily backup of a business PC. So how do we backup? Well, backup can be in many different forms as long as the information is not backed up on the same computer is exists upon. By this, it is meant you can back your information onto a CD or a DVD using a CD/DVD writer or you can back your information onto an external hard drive, but do not copy your information from one folder on the PC to another folder. This is NOT backup, this is simply duplicating the information. Backup means to backup your information on an external piece of hardware.
| Hardware |
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| Central Processing Unit |
| What Is A Hard Drive |
| What Is a Motherboard |
| What Is An Optical Drive |
| What Is RAM |