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Hard
Drive is the mechanism responsible for reading/writing information into the hard
disk and sometimes they are referred as hard disks or hard disk drives too. It is
a nonvolatile magnetic storage and is one of the most essential and standard components
of all the computers.
The operating system and the programs are stored permanently
in the hard drive and cannot be lost even if the power goes off.
If we
feel that the memory storage is not enough in our computer, it is economical and
easy to upgrade with one more hard drive rather than buying a new computer. We can
have more than one hard disk in our computers.
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Manufacturers:
Some
of the manufacturers of hard drives are Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital and Quantum
etc.
ATA/IDE
and SCSI are the standards of data access in hard drives. These are the interfaces
used by the hard drives to communicate with the computer
ATA:
There are divided in to Parallel ATA, which we use in general and Serial ATA, which
is used by new hard drives.
Parallel
ATA is generally used in the computers we use and provide speed of transfer of about
133 MBs.
Serial
ATA is used by the new hard drives and provide speed of transfer of about 150 MBs.
SCSI:
This
is generally used for professional purposes which provides quick data access. They
are used in Apple Computers.
External/Internal:
The hard
drives may be external or internal.
External
hard drives can be USB 2.0 hard drive, Parallel hard drive and FireWire 400 or 800
hard drives. External hard drives are portable, expensive than internal ones but
installation is easy compared to internal ones. External hard drives can be used
for multiple computers.
The internal
hard drives will provide more perxeformance than the external drives due to higher
data transfer speed on ATA, and SCSI than USB and Firewire.
While
buying a hard drive which may be external or internal, we should watch for the interface
(ATA or SCSI for internal or USB or FireWire for external) that our computer supports.
Generally it is wise to use external hard drives for large volumes of back ups and
archives of music/video files and internal hard drives for installing and running
programs. We recommend a hard drive capacity of 80 GB for students.
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