Understanding Storage Drives

Storage Drives are the long term storage devices for computers, and there are lots of options meaning a wide range of price points to meet a wide range of budgets and applications.  This blog will break down the specs of a current hard drive technology to make you a more informed shopper for your PC or hard drive purchase.

Hard Disk Drives (HDD)

Hard disk drives are platter based drives which are the old reliable hard drive type. They consist of a stack of storage platters with arms that read the data off the platters as needed.  These drives are have several different specs to consider.

Form Factor

The Form Factory or physical dimensions of the hard drive.  There are a few form factor standards.  They come in 1.8, 2.5, 3.5, 5.25 inches.  The most common for Desktop PCs is 3.5 inch, and 2.5 inch for Laptops.  The 1.8 can still be found for very ultra portable devices but are quite pricey, and the 5.25” is considered obsolete and replaced by the 3.5” size.  

Data and Power Connection Types

There are a couple of standards for Desktop Hard Drives and Laptop Hard Drives for their power and data connections.  The desktops have an IDE/ATA type data and power connection, and a newer SATA Power and Data connection.  The SATA type connection provides for much faster data transfer rates than the IDE/ATA connections.  The SATA Generations are SATA I, II, and III, and can handle throughput rates at 1.5, 3 and 6Gb/s respectively.  This is much faster than the IDE/ATA throughput speeds of up to only 133Mb/s.  SATA is the way to go when it comes to platter based HDD.

Seek Time

This is determined in large part by how fast the drive platters spin.  The faster the spin rate the faster the data on the hard drive can be read.  Speeds are typically as follows 4800, 5400, 7200, 10000, and 15000 rpms.  Which correlates to seeks times of 6 - 2 ms of latency on the drive, lower the seek time the fast the hard drive performs.

Capacity

This is the spec most people look at, and rightfully so, this is where the majority of your price point differences here.  Looking at SATA drives since they are the most current capacities range from 100GB to 4TB of storage space.  

Solid State Drives (SSD)

Offer storage with no moving parts.  In a lot of ways they are superior to Hard Disk Drives, however, they have some special considerations that you must be mindful of.  Solid state drives are typically instantaneous regarding seek time, they instantly become available on activation, and operate for the most part with a SATA interface.  However, they do have drawbacks.  The cost is prohibitive for very large solid state drives when you compare them to hard disk drives.  As of this article you can purchase a 4TB hard disk drive easily for about $150, where a SSD of only 1TB in capacity will be more than double the cost, around $400-$500.  They are also very vulnerable to electrical surges and don’t do well with handling multiple power surges compared to a hard disk drive.

I hope this article has helped you become a more informed Storage Drive consumer, in understanding where the price comes from for drives, and the basic benefits that each drive type can provide.