Apart from being one of the most essential parts of your computer Women's Nike Air Max 270 Pink White Australia , hard drive storage is constantly updating, in terms of both capacity of disk space and in physical size. When it comes time to upgrade your disk storage, there are a number of factors for you to take into account. Once you've made basic decisions about size, connectivity, speed and data transfer rate, and whether you want an internal drive or external Men's Nike Air Max 270 Triple Black Australia , you can search through to find the most suitable brand, and model, and compare the prices of different vendors.
How A Hard Drive Works
Your hard drive has a number of magnetized platters connected to a spindle. The spindle spins the platters at a very fast speed while a series of readwrite heads scan over them both looking for and writing information. This information is transferred via a cable system, or through a wireless connection to a hard disk controller, which in most systems is built into the motherboard, or in some systems installed as an add-in card. The information that comes from your hard drive through its controller is then made available to the components of your computer. The effectiveness of your hard drive (its performance) depends on how much of its capacity remains unused Men's Nike Air Max 270 Flyknit Oreo Black Australia , how well organised the data is (known as fragmentation) and its data transfer rate, which in turn is dependent on its connection type and the drive's spin rate.
Internal Hard Drives
Most computers from, the most basic home models up to the most powerful servers, have an internally installed hard drive. Technology today ensures that they are all generally fast, reliable, and offer dependable storage ability. Most modern computers have installation slots and cabling to enable you to install additional hard drive. This allows you to increase your storage capacity without giving up your existing hard drive.
Internal Hard Drives
External Hard Drives
These drives are essentially the same drives as ones installed inside computers Men's Nike Air Max 2018 Triple Black Australia , but cased inside a protective, portable case. This is a good solution for people who work remotely and need to transport large amounts of data. If an external hard drive is your choice, make sure your computer is compatible with the interface that the hard drive uses. An add-in card, such as a FireWire card can help to increase your computer's capabilities. You can compare different brands of external hard drives simply at and search on the connection type, or other specifications.
External Hard drives
Laptop Hard Drives
There have been many advances in miniaturization of hardware components for laptop computing, and hard drive technology is not left out of this loop. Laptop hard drives function in exactly the same way as internal hard drives on other computers Men's Nike Air Max 2018 All Black Australia , only they are designed to provide maximum storage and efficiency in the smallest possible package. For added flexibility, some laptop computers come with removable hard drives that can be easily installed and removed. However, before you buy a hard drive for your portable computer, check that the hard drive's specifications will meet the standards of your computer, as many laptop hard drives are proprietary, and are not compatible with other brands and models.
Laptop Hard Drives
Size
Your hard drive stores your operating system Men's Nike Air Max 2018 Elite Black White Australia , its programs (games and applications), your working data, and your digital music and movies. Most new computer purchases have a minimum of 80 GB of hard disk space; many have considerably more. Hard drive space is one of those things, once you have it, you'll find ways to fill it soon enough. There is no real rule of thumb, but consider the cost per gigabyte of storage as a way to guide your purchase. If you work with large files Men's Nike Shox OZ D All Black Australia , such as music, video and graphics, it pays to have a big storage space for your work. It may pay you to have two hard drives, one that houses all your programs and applications, and another for storing your work and projects.
You may want to compare the price of say a 160GB drive against two separate 80 GB drives. If one drive fails all is not lost. Today's hard drives however, are fairly robust pieces of equipment and providing they are not abuse Nike Shox Gravity Men's All Black Australia , will serve you well for a long period of time.
Interface
One key distinguishing factor between hard drives is the way in which they connect to your computer. There are a number of basic types of connection schemes used with hard drives. Each connection type has a range of differences in performance.
IDE (INTEGRATED DRIVE ELECTRONICS)
This is by the most common connection methods. Because the hard drive controller is on the drive itself rather than on the motherboard, it helps to keep costs down. There different IDE standards available. Mostly, you will want to purchase the fastest possible standard that your computer can support. Most computers will support a standard that is faster than what the computer currently supports, so you can buy a faster drive, and update your computer at a later time. The different IDE standards, in order from most basic to fastest Women's Nike Shox Gravity Pink Australia , are:
ATA (Basic). Supports up to two hard drives and features a 16-bit interface, handling transfer speeds up to 8.3 MB per second.
ATA-2 or EIDE (Enhanced IDE). Supports transfer speeds up to 13.3 MB per second.
ATA-3. A minor upgrade to ATA-2 and offers transfer speeds up to 16.6 MB per second.
Ultra-ATA (Ultra-DMA, ATA-33 or DMA-33). Dramatic speed improvements, with transfer rates up to 33 MB per second.
ATA-66. A version of ATA that doubles transfer rates up to 66 MB per second.
ATA-100. An upgrade to the ATA standard supporting transfer rates up to 100 MB per second.
ATA-133. Found mostly in AMD-based systems (not supported by Intel), with transfer rates up to 133 MB per second.