Thanks to the constant improvement of technology, the unit cost solid state drives is steadily decreasing, and their volume and resource, on the contrary, are growing. Despite this, hard drives will be relevant for quite a long time and manufacturers do not stop striving to improve their performance characteristics.
Actually, the design of the HDD has not changed fundamentally for a long time - from one to four light round plates rotate inside the sealed case, and several magnetic heads move above them and record/read information. The efforts of manufacturing companies are aimed at modernizing the fastening units of moving elements, selecting the composition of the ferromagnetic layer on the disks, improving the parameters of the drive and heads, as well as optimizing control algorithms for all this equipment.
The most important selection criteria
Geometric dimensions
The term “form factor” is more often used, but there is one caveat. There are two main HDD sizes: 3.5 inches for desktops and 2.5 inches for laptops. As a rule, the thickness of the drive depends on the number of platters, and while for desktop PCs its value is not particularly important, for portable devices it can play a decisive role. Ultrathin laptops are designed to accommodate 7 or even 5 mm hard drives, while the most widely available devices are 9.5 mm thick.
Purpose of the hard drive
Perhaps the most important criterion is the purpose hard drive. If its main task is storing various information— volume requirements are brought to the fore disk space and unit cost. Currently, the optimal choice here is 2-4 TB drives with low energy consumption. At the same time, they do not pay much attention to the rotation speed of the plates. For HDDs of this category it is usually 5400 rpm, but it can be higher. For responsible data storage drives are organized into RAID arrays and reliability, expressed in the time between failures of the device, is added to the requirements. Hard disks For corporate sector have an expanded set of design features that increase the “survivability” of the HDD and the corresponding cost. Network-attached storage drives are required to be instantly ready for communication at any time, so the firmware for their controllers is modified accordingly, usually at the expense of energy efficiency.
System drives must provide maximum speed reading and, to a lesser extent, writing. Their distinguishing feature is more high frequency rotation of the plates (7200 rpm and more), and a side effect of intense engine operation is increased heat and noise. Of course, you need to focus on drives with the most powerful interface that supports motherboard(currently SATA III). In operating rooms Windows systems XP and Windows 7 had problems with large boot partitions, so as system drives, drives with a capacity of 3 GB and higher were used taking this factor into account. A kind of compromise between the affordable cost of HDD and the high SSD performance are hybrid devices. In single-disk workstations or laptops, such drives can significantly increase the loading speed of the operating system.
Volume
When choosing a hard drive, special attention is always paid to its capacity. It is its lack in most cases that is the driving reason for the purchase. From the point of view of the cost of a unit of information storage, the most profitable are HDDs with a capacity of 2 or 4 TB for desktop systems and terabyte ones for mobile devices. Advantage should be given to disks with fewer platters. Having a higher recording density, such media provide a higher exchange rate, and the device itself heats up less during operation.
Photo: domcomputer.ru
Other characteristics
- Relevant today interfaces are SATA III for consumer use and SAS for servers. There are also hard ones on sale. SATA drives II. While remaining fully compatible in terms of connectivity, they have half the throughput than the interfaces of the third revision of this standard. For older equipment, drives with a parallel bus (PATA - also known as IDE) may be required.
- The higher read/write speed, the faster the data will be exchanged with the disk. You just have to keep in mind that manufacturers like to indicate in the characteristics the maximum values that are ideally achieved. In fact, the speed decreases as the heads approach the center of the platter and depends on the size of the data block and the weight of other things. For example, in real conditions, exchange almost always goes in both directions. Typical maximum values for drives with a SATA III interface range from 130 to 180 MB/s.
- Plate rotation speed important if maximum performance is required, even at the expense of other parameters. For drives designed for other tasks, its value may be variable or not specified by the manufacturers.
- You can speed up hard drive performance to a certain extent. cache memory. During the reading process, data from neighboring blocks is also extracted and placed in a special buffer in the expectation that they will be needed the next time the drive is accessed. When reading a large array, this always has a positive effect. The larger the cache size, the greater the performance increase - this was one of the reasons for the creation of hybrid devices. The other side of the coin is the increase in price and the difficulty of coordinating read/write operations.
- Power consumption indirectly characterizes the probable heating of the HDD. As expected, high-speed drives are more power-hungry and heat up faster, while their slow counterparts are more economical and relatively cooler. In read/write modes, the former consume power from 8 to 12 W, the latter require 4-5. Hard drives of the 2.5" form factor are much more modest in their appetites; 2-3 W are enough for them. Of particular interest is the amount of consumption at rest, which serves as a clear indicator of the energy efficiency of the device.
Main manufacturers
Hard drives are a fairly high-tech product, so the initially small number of companies specializing in their production is constantly shrinking. The most popular hard drives produced Western Digital, Seagate Technology, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) and, to a lesser extent, Samsung Electronics. Products are very popular in the 2.5-inch HDD segment Toshiba Corporation, and the drives of this company serve as the basis for 2/3 of external hard drives, produced under other brands.
Photo: www.komposervis.ru
When purchasing a HDD, first of all consider how it will be used. The operating system installed on “green” series disks will load more slowly than it could. The speed of data exchange with fast drives will delight your heart, if you forget about their cost. Losing information can significantly complicate life, so serious matters should be trusted only to hard drives with increased reliability.
Choosing HDD for a laptop, do not forget to pay attention to the size match. The thinner mobile device, the higher the likelihood of installing a Thin or Ultrathin drive in it. On the other hand, the HDD bay of almost any laptop has one or another system for increasing shock resistance, which is based on installing the disk surrounded by damping material. A good option Here you will purchase a hard drive that includes a special thickening pad.
When planning to purchase a hard drive of the required capacity, remember that the value indicated by the manufacturer and the actual capacity of the formatted drive are, as they say in Odessa, two big differences. As a rule, hard drives indicate capacity in billions (G) or trillions (T) bytes. And since one terabyte consists of 1,099,511,627,776 minimally addressable data sets (1024 to the 4th power), then the volume in the corresponding units is smaller.
To choose the right hard drive, you must first determine the purpose of its use. Firstly, the choice may be related to the installation of the operating system on the hard drive. Secondly, a hard drive can be designed to store data, that is, music, videos, photos, etc.
In addition, you must keep in mind that for desktop computer system drives are designed in a form factor such as 3.5 inches, and for laptops - 2.5-inch models. You also need to decide on the desired capacity. If you plan to use only one hard drive, then it is advisable to purchase it with the largest possible capacity.
Hard drive platters
Today, hard drives contain from 1 to 4 plates. IN in this case the correct choice corresponds to the option where there is one plate. This is due to the fact that:
- one plate allows for faster reading of information. In addition, OS performance depends on the positioning of the heads, so in this case it will be higher;
- a single-platter disk requires less mechanical parts. Based on this, the risk of breakdowns is reduced and the noise level is significantly reduced;
- less heat generation will extend the service life of the drive in question.
HDD spindle speed
Typically, spindle rotation is determined by indicators such as 5400 and 7200 rpm. Higher speeds are usually observed for those hard drives that are part of servers. There are also models where rpm can be determined by any value from 5400 to 7200.
In turn, a high rotation speed allows you to significantly speed up the processing of parameters such as reading and writing information. At the same time, disks with lower rotation speeds have a quieter operating mode. If you intend to install on HDD operating system, then it is worth choosing those options that are characterized by an indicator of 7200 rpm. Otherwise, the speed mode of 5400 rpm is quite suitable.
Good afternoon, dear readers! 🙂
I think it would be useful for you and me to consider this question, which concerns the choice of a hard drive, or rather, to talk about their volumes.
A seemingly simple question: “How much space do you need?” delivers after wrong decision a huge number of problems. Perhaps you don’t quite understand what I mean yet, but now I’ll explain….
HDD- a seemingly simple device designed for storing information on a computer.
Nevertheless, this device has many parameters (and in order to choose the right hard drive you need to take them all into account, or contact a specialist), inattention to which leads to the biggest, without exaggeration, the most bitter and expensive problems who only meet with computers - loss of information. Data loss is the biggest problem a user can face. Data, as you know, is the highest value. These are some works that you have done over the course of months or years, a photo archive, valuable videos or text materials... Whatever! Personally, I experienced such a situation as once upon a time my HDD, which was large at that time and had a capacity of 400GB, failed irretrievably!!! All data I'm irretrievably lost- and there were a lot of them - regarding my business, work, life... I would need some things today, but this is no longer there... 🙁 This cannot be conveyed, but when this happens, you understand for the rest of your life the importance of data storage security...
Therefore, I think there is no need to explain this to anyone further, everything is already clear. This is exactly why, even if you saved on some other PC components, or chose them incorrectly, then ANYWAY when purchasing a PC choice of hard disk - IT IS MOST IMPORTANT!!! You can't save money on this! It's better to have someone help you specialist…
So, the first question in the series of articles is the size of the hard drive...
It is not enough to just roughly “estimate” how much space you need. We must again start from REQUIREMENTS to your PC and your tasks. If this is an office PC, 120-160 GB will be more than enough for the coming years.
If it is a multimedia computer, make sure that it has a HDD of at least 200-250GB. After all, multimedia is large volumes: photos, videos, just extraneous data...
A gaming computer should have a disk of at least 320GB - this is the minimum or optimal for now. But since data volumes are constantly growing rapidly, if you are building a PC with an eye to the future, it is better to take (for a gamer) a disk of 400GB or more. It will be enough for 3-4 years.
This is so - approximate estimates of what it's for... They're suitable if you don't have a PC right now and you just want to buy one. For those who have already worked with a PC:
See if you are running out of space on your old PC? Maybe it once happened that a friend brought you an amateur video from a vacation, but it was difficult for you to place this file, several GB in size, on your HDD? Take a closer look at all this, count... Look at how many this moment space on your hard drive(s) is occupied... Add to all this your plans for the future: Maybe you will play modern games, each of which (modern) takes up from 5 to 10-15 gigabytes on the disk? Maybe you are planning to buy a good photo or video camera later? The volumes of modern photos (about 10 MB picture in 8 megapixel resolution) and video are quite large. Add it all up and look what you get - how many gigabytes.
One more point: if you do not do this, but determine the HDD volume you “need” by eye, then in the future there may be problems such as lack of space, close to 100% HDD load. Then you will need to buy another, more capacious hard drive, install it in the PC along with this one, etc. the result is two (or several) small disks, which, among other things, create noise and are absolutely unprofitable. One capacious HDD will cost less than two (or even more so several) HDDs, the total equivalent to one capacious one.
Next, choosing the volume you need is half the battle. You also need to take care of the RELIABILITY of data storage. For example, a 500GB disk is 75% loaded - it stores your personal documents and files... HDD - can fail, the reception is irreversible, completely “out of the blue” completely and irrevocably!!! Conclusion - you need to take care of where to archive or copy “all your acquired goods” in case of a failure. Storing especially important data in a single copy and in one place is completely unacceptable!
The archiving device can be a writer DVD drive(if out of this 75%, you want to write down only the MOST VALUABLE). Or it will be another HDD. However, this is the topic of a separate article, let’s not mix everything together. Subscribe to RSS or stay tuned to be the first to read future articles!
So, I told you about how you need to select the size of your hard drive... Of course, this is not ALL that you NEED to pay attention to when purchasing, but this parameter is one of the main ones...
That's all for today! See you! 🙂