General Hard Drive Review
Nowadays it is almost impossible to imagine our dear tech world without hard drives. I will give you a hardcore hard drive review on what these pieces of hardware can and cannot do. But first we must ask ourselves one question. Is it possible to use a computer without any hard drive at all? The answer is surprisingly yes. I remember quite an odd situation from my college years. We had only one computer in our room and one day its owner decided to make a trip back home and take the hard drive with him, so my room mate and I were left with a computer without a hard drive. We didn't despair though and we got ourselves a Windows 98 boot disk and another diskette containing the world renowned game Mario. We simply booted up, removed the boot disk and put the other disk back in. After about two days we got sick of the game. It was the time for more advanced techniques. So we played Sid Meier's Civilization, the very first one of them. The problem with this game was that you needed two disks in order to play it. The Windows 98 boot disk came to our rescue. There is a rather not very well known goodie attached to it. It is called RamDrive. This allows you to use a portion of your RAM as a storage device. By editing the startup options from the boot disk we managed to raise the measly 2 MB it initially offered to around 5 MB. So we booted up, copied the two game disks into the ramdrive, started a dos driver for the mouse and voila we had Civilization. There was a major drawback with the ramdrive though, as it has a volatile memory, so every time you rebooted you had to make all these steps again. We simply took care not to shutdown the computer. It went like a charm and besides Sid Meier really makes good games. This rather anecdotal story proves just how much can be done without a hard drive. Of course it also shows you the main benefits that a hard drive has to offer: large amount of space, persistency and derived from them the ability to use more complex software including GUI (Graphical User Interface) Operating Systems. Of course in theory you could have a preinstalled OS on a cd for example and run everything from there. I think that there a few versions of Linux that can accomplish this. Unfortunately though I am not a big Linux fan so this option is really out of my league. The problem with cds though is the fact that they have a read only memory, so they won't allow you to save any settings, this further on means no internet connection, because I really can't see any way in which you can enter those settings including IP address, subnet mask, gateway information in a persistent form. This shows another strength of the hard drive. It also allows to write information on it. Another interesting approach to bypass the usage of a hard disk is to use a flash memory. Besides their relative small capacity they have the exact same features that the hard drives do plus they are much more faster. It can easily be predicted that flash memories are here to stay and will more likely be used on a more extensive scale in the near future. The speed with which they can be accessed also makes them quite a good alternative for the classic RAM memories. The new Microsoft Vista will use memory sticks in this respect to add a power boost to your PC and this is just the beginning. But enough about alternatives. To get a strong a hard drive review we must see the hard drives as they really are at the moment: a piece of equipment which is an organic part of a computer system and without them we couldn't really imagine our modern computer world. Basically a hard drive is made up by several high density magnetic disks and an additional system to write and read on these disks. Obviously the most important factor is capacity, measured in gigabytes and probably soon enough in terabytes. The standard to date is at around 150 gigs. When setting a standard I usually see which hard drive offers the best capacity versus price ratio. Another thing that is crucially important is the speed, or to be more accurate the speed with which the data from the hard drive can be retrieved. Here there are several parameters which must be taken into account. First there is the rotation speed. Typically are situated at 7200 RPM, with newer hard drives running at 10000 RPM and SCSI hard drives running faster still. Another important factor you must take into account when making a hard drive review is the cache size. The cache is a very fast portion of memory which is used as a buffer to prefetch data from the drive. Then it comes the seek time (the amount of time which the hard drive takes to find data). The seek time is greatly controversial as many hard drive manufacturers "forget" to add the latency, or present it separately. There are also factors which can turn a good hard drive into an excellent one. A good noise reduction system is worth the extra money. My old hard drive sounds like a chainsaw when you start it and trust me that's not a pretty sight (or sound). The reliability factor is crucial, but I decided to save it for last as the hard drives nowadays all tend to be extremely reliable. A warranty of 3 years is enough to convince anyone I suppose.
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