Admittedly, the hard drive is an important part of desktop computers, although storage media is a very important part of all computing devices, but especially in the case of desktop computers. It is important to know some important terms about hard drives, be it when buying a new desktop or installing a new drive on an old computer. A few days ago I shared the guide line for buying external drives and since then I have been thinking of describing the guide for buying primary hard disk, because it is more important.
The good news here is that choosing the right desktop hard disk for the right job is not a difficult task. And the computer drive specification is much easier to understand. When buying a hard disk you usually have to keep in mind two things, and they are two according to your needs: disk capacity and speed. In the case of hard drives you will get many types of capacity options and speed ratings, there are hundreds of choices in front of you, but which one will you choose for your job? - These issues are discussed in detail in this entire article.
Types of hard drives
Hard disk is not to say that you bought what you wanted, you didn't even think about what you were buying for a job. Although there are different types of storage solutions on the market now, if we talk only about mechanical drives, there are many types of drives and each type is targeted for different tasks. There are three common types of hard drives: standard desktop drives, NAS / NAS drives, and enterprise hard drives. If you are thinking of buying a drive for a normal desktop PC, then a standard desktop drive will suffice for you, there is no need to buy NAS or enterprise grade drive. Many times there is no difference in performance between all types of drives, just some different protection. Normal NAS drives and desktop drives, for example, give exactly the same performance, but desktop drives are rated for 7-8 hours a day, while NAS drives or enterprise drives are rated for 24 hours a day. Expensive drives also have shock and vibration protection. Vibration protection may be necessary if you have multiple drives installed on your computer.
I have already talked about the types of hard drives, desktop, NAS, enterprise Which to buy? - We have discussed in detail in this article. When it comes to choosing hard drive types, the conclusion is that when buying a typical desktop drive, you should not look at different types, but if you set up multiple drives or RAID systems, it would be best to buy an NAS drive instead of a simple desktop drive. And without a server or a specially important backup system, you won't need an enterprise grade drive.
Capacity
Understanding a desktop hard drive or any media storage capacity rating is a very simple task. Maybe you have already read this paragraph and are already aware of this. Almost any computer storage media manufacturer, starting with hard disk, drives their storage solutions as GB (Gigabyte) or TB (Terabyte). In a nutshell, these drives are capable of storing billions of bytes of data in gigabytes and trillions of bytes in terabytes.
The capacity of your drive is specifically written on the drive. Today the standard desktop drive size is 1 terabyte, although it is possible to meet the general computing needs even with a smaller capacity, but now the price of the drive is much lower so you can buy a few terabyte drives starting from 1 terabyte. If you love to download movies and big games, the more capacity you have, the better. If you use a computer just for work and to run the necessary software, then a few gigabytes of capacity may be enough. However, there is a special term for capacity, which makes many of us confused. The hard drive may have a rating of 1 terabyte, but when it is inserted into the computer, 931 gigabytes are displayed. So where does the rest of the space go? - No problem, I explained this completely, "Where does the lost space of your hard drive go?" I wrote this article, here you will find the answers to all the questions.
Performance
Now we come to the part where we talk about the middle ground. Drive performance or drive speed is a very important term in computers. Many people blame computer RAM or processor for slow computer, but most of the time computer tasks become slow due to poor drive performance. Mechanical drive performance is largely dependent on four factors: (1) connection interface, (2) mechanical drive speed, (3) access time, and (4) buffer size.
There are currently two types of interfaces on the market for PC or personal computer drives: Serial ATA (SATA) and IDE (ATA). Earlier some high performance desktops used to have SCSI interfaces, but now these two interfaces are basically available. Currently, the IDE interface is the most common type of personal computer. Connection speed can be found from IDE interface number. Speed ranges from ATA / 33 to ATA / 133 are available. Most desktop drives today are ATA / 100, which means this interface will support speeds up to 100 MB / sec.
Serial ATA or SATA on the other hand is a new interface and it is replacing the IDE interface. This interface is very simple and only one cable is used for one drive. This new interface is capable of providing speeds ranging from 150 megabytes / second to 300 megabits / second.
Now if we talk about hard drive mechanical spinning speed, then you must know that there are some disks in hard drive and they move physically. The faster these disks rotate, the higher the data speed. The standard spinning rate for most desktop drives today is 7200 rpm (Revolution / min). There are some high quality desktop drives that can rotate at 10000 rpm. There is also a 5400 rpm drive on the market, which is definitely slower than 7200 rpm. So of course your drive should be at least 7200 rpm, it should not be less.
Response time is the rate at which the head of your hard drive quickly reaches the disk and captures data from there. The faster the head disk is accessed, the faster the data can be read or written. How hard drives work, this article gives you a brief overview on hard disk structure and how it works.
The final step of the performance is the buffer size of the drive. From installing a small capacity RAM in your drive. This RAM especially the data that the computer repeatedly accesses from the hard drive, stores it on the hard disk ঐ RAM, RAM is usually a lot of fast memory, so the drive can transfer random access data to the computer much faster. The larger the buffer size, the more cache the drive will have to save in RAM and the faster the data will be transferred. How does computer memory work? - From this article you will know more detailed information about how different types of memory contribute to computer. However, a normal drive has a buffer size of 8 MB and a high performance drive has a buffer size of up to 16 MB.
SSD and hybrid drive
If you want to get high performance or low boot time on desktop computer then solid state drive can help best. No matter how much you use a high performance hard drive, just a simple solid drive can drown a high performance mechanical drive. Although I have written many articles about SSD before, if you go to the search bar and type "SSD" you will find many articles. Especially "HDD vs SSD" - don't forget to read the article.
There is another type of drive, the hybrid drive - which I wrote about earlier; Here SSD and hard drive are connected together. Programs and operating systems are served from the SSD module and general files are served from the hard drive module. The real focus of this drive is to balance both good performance and storage capacity at low prices. The biggest disadvantage of SSD is its price, although the price has come down a lot these days, but still another limitation is capacity. SSDs are only available up to a few terabytes (on a single drive) - where hard disks are available up to huge capacity and the price is much lower. However, in this article I will not discuss SSD or hybrid drive again, because I am talking about hard drive in particular.
Decision
I have discussed enough in the above paragraphs, now it is time to make the right decision. Hopefully by now you have been able to make the right decision on your own, but still I recommend the hard drive according to the work to make the guide line easier. If your work does not fall into a specific category, then there is no need to buy a high RPM drive or high capacity. Check out the table below, hopefully it will help you a lot.
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