Saturday, September 20, 2008

Hard drive speed

Your hard drive is one of the core components of your system. The other two being your memory and your CPU. When you run an application the application's data is loaded from your hard drive to your memory. Then data is moved from your memory to your chip, where it is processed. With larger applications quite a bit of data might have to be moved between your memory and your hard drive. If you have a slow hard drive, it can become a bottleneck bringing down the speed of you whole system.

Parts of a hard drive

You usually don't see the inside of a hard drive, they are closed up pretty good. But if you did open one you would be able to spot 3 parts. The rotating disks, on which the data is electromagnetically stored, the disk head that reads and writes data from the disks and the buffer. Data is read into the buffer before it is moved from and too the memory.

The very cool movie below shows you just what a operating hard drive looks like, on the inside.



Speed factors

The speed of a hard drive is generally measured in RPM (revolutions per minute). That is how many times the fixed disks, mentioned above, rotate in a minute. Generally the more the better. A standard drive would have a RPM of 5,400 a high end drive would have 7,200 and a gamer drive would have 10,000. It is generally not advisable to go faster than that, because it brings the maximum storage capacity of the drive down significantly.

Another factor is the buffer size of the drive. The larger the buffer the faster the drive retrieves data.

Drive breakage

As you will have noticed hard drives have moving parts. This makes them prone to breaking down. It is therefor advisable to backup the data on those drives. You might want to read best external backup drive and backup software to find out more about backing up your data.

Trusted hard drive brands

It is just not worth buying a hard drive from a unknown company, I strongly recommend you stick to the following brands:
  • Seagate
  • Buffalo
  • Western Digital
  • Maxtor
A word about SATA

SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment is the newest development in hard drive technology. It is a new connection or bus between a hard drive and a motherboard. The technology has borrowed from Firewire and USB and has been successful in decreasing hard drive response times by quite a bit.

You can find more information on SATA on Wikipedia.

Testing your drive
If you are interested in knowing how your drive stacks up, why not use this free hard drive speed test software.