Was Sie schon immer über Festplatten wissen wollten. Wenn Sie das Grundwissen über Festplatten verstehen, können Sie bessere Speicherentscheidungen treffen

Was macht eine Festplatte?

Bei einer Festplatte handelt es sich um eine Hardware-Komponente, die all Ihre digitalen Inhalte speichert. Zu den digitalen Inhalten, die auf der Festplatte gespeichert werden, zählen Dokumente, Bilder, Musik, Videos, Programme, Anwendungseinstellungen und das Betriebssystem. Es gibt interne und externe Festplatten.

Die auf der Festplatte gespeicherten Inhalte werden hinsichtlich ihrer Dateigröße bemessen. Dokumente (Texte) sind im Allgemeinen sehr klein, wohingegen Bilder groß sind, Musikdateien noch größer und Videodateien am größten. Die Größe der digitalen Dateien auf einer Festplatte wird in Megabyte (MB), Gigabyte (GB) und Terabyte (TB) festgelegt.¹

Was ist die beste Festplattengröße?

Das kommt darauf an. Wenn Sie nur eine begrenzte Anzahl an Dateien von einem Computer auf ein Sicherungslaufwerk übertragen möchten, reicht ein kleineres Laufwerk (Expansion-Festplatte oder Backup Plus) völlig aus. Wenn Sie allerdings Ihren gesamten Computer oder mehrere Computer sichern möchten – oder sie viele Video- und/oder Audiodateien speichern – benötigen Sie ein größeres Laufwerk (Backup Plus Desktop Drive).

Hier sehen Sie eine Schätzung davon, wie viel Sie auf einer Festplatte (bis zu 10 TB) speichern können.²

PC oder Mac?

Manche Festplatten sind zwar vorformatiert, um entweder für einen PC oder einen MAC verwendet zu werden, aber jede Festplatte kann so umformatiert werden, dass sie mit einer der beiden Computerarten genutzt werden kann.

Ist die Geschwindigkeit einer Festplatte von Bedeutung?

Die Drehzahl (Umdrehungen pro Minute oder U/min.) ist relativ wichtig. Je schneller eine Disk (Platte) dreht, desto schneller kann Ihr Computer die gewünschte Datei finden.

Eine Festplatte mit 7200 U/min ist offensichtlich schneller als eine Festplatte mit 5400 U/min. Wenn es sich um externe Festplatten handelt, fällt Ihnen jedoch zwischen den beiden Geschwindigkeiten (U/min) kaum ein Unterschied auf. Das Gleiche gilt für interne Festplatte, vor allem, wenn es sich um kleine Dateien handelt. Bei größeren Dateien und Anwendungen ist die Festplatte mit 7200 U/min jedoch deutlich schneller.

Soll ich mich für eine interne oder eine externe Festplatte entscheiden?

Das kommt ganz auf Ihre Situation an. Wenn Sie die interne Festplatte (BarraCuda) Ihres Computers aufrüsten, erhalten Sie eingebauten Speicherplatz für all Ihre Dateien. Eine externe Festplatte bietet Ihnen jederzeit tragbaren Speicher für unterwegs (Backup Plus).

Datensicherung ist wichtig

Wenn die Festplatte Ihres Computers beschädigt wird, besteht das Risiko, dass Sie Ihre gesamten digitalen Inhalte verlieren. Deshalb sichern die meisten Benutzer Ihre Inhalte nicht nur auf der internen Festplatte des Computers, sondern zusätzlich auf einer externen Festplatte.

1 Bei der Festplattenkapazität entspricht ein Gigabyte (GB) einer Milliarde Byte. Die verfügbare Kapazität kann je nach Betriebsumgebung und Formatierung variieren. Anwendungsbezogene Nutzungsbeispiele, die eine bestimmte Speichermenge nennen, dienen ausschließlich der Veranschaulichung. Der tatsächliche Speicherbedarf kann aufgrund verschiedener Faktoren, wie Dateigröße, Dateiformat, Funktionen und Anwendungssoftware, variieren.
2 Durchschnittliche Dateigröße (JPEG-Format) bei höchster Kameraauflösung. Die tatsächliche Bildmenge pro Festplatte kann variieren und hängt vom Kameramodell ab. Basierend auf 2-stündigen Filmen in DVD-Qualität.

What Is a Computer Hard Drive?

A traditional computer hard drive is the storage pot for your files, operating system, and more. Learn more about this important PC component here.

When you’re buying a computer, you have a number of decisions to make. You’ll need to decide what type of CPU you want, how much RAM you need, and what size hard drive you require.

What is a computer hard drive, exactly? How does a hard drive work and what does it do? What size hard drive should you get, and how can you tell what size hard drive you already have?

All important questions with answers that we’ve outlined below.

What Is a Hard Drive?

A hard drive (also known as a hard disk drive or HDD) is a computer storage device found in many computers. A hard drive is intended for long-term data storage.

Unlike your system RAM, a hard drive will continue to store data even when you turn your computer off.

Hard drives were once part of almost every computer. The rise of solid state drives (or SSDs) has started to make the classic hard drive obsolete in modern PCs, thanks to their faster read and write speeds. However, thanks to the large amounts of data that hard drives can store (and increased reliability compared to SSDs), hard drives still have an important role to play in modern computing.

Somewhat confusingly, the term hard drive might be used to refer to a solid state drive if it’s being used as a catch-all term for your long-term computer storage. While this isn’t strictly accurate, it’s important to be aware of this usage of the term.

What Does a Hard Drive Do?

A hard drive is a component of your computer that stores all of your data, including your documents, photos, videos, apps, and even your operating system. When you use your computer, the relevant information is passed from your hard drive to your computer RAM.  The CPU (the brains of your computer) can then quickly access this information from RAM, as it can be read much faster from RAM than it can from your hard drive.

In essence, the hard drive is the long-term memory of your computer, and RAM is the short-term memory.

Traditional hard drives use a magnetic disc to store information. This disk is divided into billions of tiny sections—each section can be either magnetized or demagnetized. These areas represent the ones and zeros, or bits, that are the most basic unit of digital information. The way that the hard drive reads and writes these tiny areas is similar to a vinyl record.

The disk spins and a movable head can move back and forth across the disk to read from or write to the disk.

Hard drives can be installed internally in your computer, but you can also purchase external hard drives which connect to your computer and allow you to easily add more hard disk storage space without having to open your computer up.

SSD vs Classic HDD

As mentioned above, the term ‘hard drive’ is often used interchangeably for both classic hard drives and modern SSDs. These are two very different pieces of kit, however, that have significantly different strengths and weaknesses.

A classic HDD uses a magnetic disk to store information. This offers a lot of benefits, one of the most important of which is that HDDs can offer high storage capacities at relatively inexpensive prices. The downside is that the way data is stored and retrieved makes HDDs comparatively slow. To access information on the disk, the head needs to move to the correct place on the disk before it can read it. If data is spread across a number of separate locations, the head must visit them all in turn.

This inevitably takes time, although modern HDDs are certainly no slouches. In comparison, an SDD has no moving parts. All of the data is stored in millions of transistors that are turned on or off. It’s similar to the type of storage that you find in a memory card or a thumb drive.

Since retrieving the data doesn’t require any physical parts to move, SSDs can work significantly faster than classic HDDs.  The payoff is that an SSD is much more expensive than an HDD of the same capacity. There are also other differences—since an SSD has no moving parts, it’s much less susceptible to damage from being dropped than an HDD is. On the flip side, HDDs tend to last longer than SSDs do.

The type of drive you will need will depend on what is most important to you. If you’re looking for blazing speeds and don’t require that much storage space, an SSD is a good bet. If speed isn’t a huge issue, but you really need a lot of storage space, a classic HDD is a much more cost-effective option.

What Size Hard Drive Do I Need?

The size of the hard drive that you need depends on how you use your computer and the amount of data you need to store.

Your operating system and any apps that you choose to install will take up some of the space on your hard drive. The rest of the space in your hard drive is available for saving files. You might also choose to use a separate external hard drive to make a backup of your entire system. This means that if anything goes wrong, you can restore everything from your backup.

Hard drives usually offer gigabytes or terabytes of storage space. One terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes, although due to the discrepancies between decimal and binary formats, a 1 TB hard drive may actually have slightly fewer than 1,000 GB.

To give you some idea of the size of the hard drive you’ll need, these are some rough approximations of the sizes of different types of files:

• Word documents: 0. 02 MB
• Standard music files: 4 MB
• Lossless music files: 20 MB
• JPEG photo: 5 MB
• SD movie: 4 GB
• HD movie: 15 GB
• 4K movie: 60 GB

As you can see, how much you can fit on your hard drive depends entirely on the type of information you’re storing. For example, 1,500,000,000 Word documents could take up the same amount of space as an hour of 4K video. You will also need to factor in the amount of space that your operating system and apps will take up, which can be 50 GB or more.

Your needs may vary, but as a rule of thumb, up to 500 GB should be sufficient for light use, up to 1 TB will meet the needs of most users, and if you’re a heavy user, you might need multiple terabytes of storage space.

What Size Hard Drive Do I Have?

When your hard drive gets too full, you may find that your computer starts to slow down significantly. If you think your hard drive may be too small, you can check how large it is, and how much of it is in use.

How to Find Hard Drive Size on Windows

You can see information about the size of drives on your computer through File Explorer. However, if your hard drive is partitioned into multiple smaller drives (you might have a C drive and a D drive, for example) then you can’t see the total size of your hard drive. To find the total size of your physical hard drive, you can use the Disk Management utility.

To find your hard drive size on Windows:

1. Press Windows+R to bring up the Run dialog box.
2. Type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3. The Disk Management window will appear. At the bottom of the window, you will see information on all of your hard drives, including the total size.
4. You can also see information on how much space is available in each partition.

How to Find Hard Drive Size on Mac

You can find information about any hard drives installed in or connected to your Mac in just a few clicks.

To find your hard drive size on Mac:

1. Click on the Apple icon.
2. Select About This Mac.
3. Click on the Storage tab.
4. You will see the available space as well as the total size of every hard drive.

Keeping Your Hard Drive Healthy

Your computer hard drive is one of the most important parts of your computer. If it fails, you can potentially lose all of your files. That’s why it’s important to look after your hard drive, and also be sure to have backups in place.

You can head off problems before they occur by checking if your hard drive is going to fail. You can also try to prevent hard drive failures by checking for and fixing disk errors. If things go wrong, it may be possible to recover data from a hard drive that won’t boot.

It’s always wise to keep a full system backup in case the worst does happen. You don’t necessarily need additional hard drive space to do so; you could also consider backing up your data to the cloud.

Related Items:Desktop, explainer

What is a hard drive and what does it do?

Edited: 04/07/2023

Opened hard drive

Hard drives, also known as HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) or Wichesters, were invented over 60 years ago and have been used in personal computers since the mid-1980s (although flash memory has replaced them). in many products in recent years). A hard drive is a device that gives you a huge information capacity and allows you to store files, movies, photos, music and text documents. In addition, the operating system and computer software are installed on it. How does a hard drive work and what is it for? Let’s take a closer look!

Contents

How to store information with magnetism

The science of magnetism is complex. But if you’ve ever fooled around with a magnet and nails, you know that the technology – science in action – is pretty simple. Iron nails are not initially magnetic, but if you rub them back and forth with a magnet, you can make them magnetic so they stick to each other. Magnetism has several simple practical applications. For example, landfills use electromagnets (huge magnets that can be turned on and off with electricity) to pick up and move piles of scrap metal.

Magnetism has another very important application. Suppose you need to leave a message to a friend and all you have is a magnet and a non-magnetic iron nail. Let’s say the message is very simple: you either see your friend later that day, or you don’t. You can arrange with your friend that you will throw a nail in his mailbox. If it’s magnetized, you’ll see them later, if the nail isn’t magnetized, you won’t. Your friend comes home from school and finds a nail on the rug. He takes him to the kitchen table and touches the paperclip. If the nail is magnetized, it will stick to it. It’s a rather strange way to leave someone a message, but it illustrates something very important: magnetism can be used to store information.

If your computer has a 20 gigabyte (GB) hard drive, it’s a bit like a box containing 160 billion microscopic iron nails, each of which can store one tiny piece of information called a bit. A bit is a binary digit – either zero or one. In computers, numbers are not stored as decimal (base 10), but as patterns of binary digits. For example, the decimal number 382 is stored as the binary number 101111110. Letters and other characters can also be stored as binary numbers. So computers store the capital letter A as the decimal number 65, or the binary number 1000001. Let’s say you want to store the number 1000001 on your computer in this big box of iron nails. You need to find a row of seven unused nails. You magnetize the first one (to keep the 1), leave the next five demagnetized (to keep the five zeros), and magnetize the last one (to keep the 1).

How the hard drive works

Hard disk magnetic platter

There are no iron nails on your computer’s hard drive. It’s just a big, shiny, circular “plate” of magnetic material, divided into billions of tiny areas. Each of these regions can be independently magnetized (to keep 1) or demagnetized (to keep 0). Magnetism is used in computer storage because it continues to store information even when the power is turned off. If you magnetize a nail, it will remain magnetized until you demagnetize it. Similarly, computerized information (or data) stored on your PC’s hard drive remains there even after the power is turned off.

What is included in a hard drive?

A hard drive consists of only a few basic parts. There are one or more shiny silver plates or “pancakes” on which information is stored magnetically. There is a positioning device (actuator) that is designed to move a tiny magnet called a read-write head back and forth across the platters to write or read information. There is an electronic circuit to control everything that acts as a link between the hard drive and the rest of your computer.

Hard drive design

HDD components:

• Actuator that moves the read/write lever. In older hard drives, the actuators were stepper motors. Instead, most modern hard drives use simple electromagnets. They position the read/write arm faster, more accurately and more reliably than stepper motors and are less sensitive to issues such as temperature fluctuations.
• The actuator turns the head back and forth across the plate.
• The central spindle allows the “pancakes” to rotate at high speed.
• A magnetic disk stores information in binary form.
• Plug connections connect the hard drive to the printed circuit board of a personal computer.
• The read/write head is a tiny magnet on the end of the positioner.
• The circuit board on the underside controls the data flow to the plate.
• Flexible connector transfers data from PCB to magnetic head and plate.
• The small spindle allows the positioner to move across the plate.

The platters are the most important parts of a hard drive. As the name suggests, these are discs made of a hard material such as ceramic or aluminum and coated with a thin layer of metal that can be magnetized or demagnetized. A small hard drive usually has only one platter, but each side is magnetically coated. High capacity discs have multiple platters mounted on a central spindle with a small gap between them. The platters spin at up to 15,000 revolutions per minute (RPM), so the read/write heads can access any part of them.

There are two heads for each platter, one for reading from the top surface and one for reading from the bottom, so a five-platter hard drive would (say) need ten separate heads. The heads are mounted on an electrically operated lever that moves from the center of the drive to the outer edge and back. To reduce wear, they do not actually touch the disk, but hover above it. When starting, the spindle with pancakes spins first, and only after the air flow necessary for soaring appears, the heads begin to move.

Reading and writing data

Hard Disk Read/Write System

The most important thing in memory is not the ability to store information, but the ability to find it later. Imagine storing a magnetized iron nail in a pile of 1.6 million million identical nails, and you’ll have some idea of ​​the problems your computer would run into if it didn’t use a very methodical way of storing its information. Consider the principle of the hard drive when working with information.

When your computer stores data on a hard drive, it doesn’t just throw magnetized nails into a box, shuffling them together. The data is stored in a very organized way on each plate. Data bits are arranged in concentric circular paths called tracks. Each track is divided into smaller areas called sectors. Part of the hard disk stores a map of sectors, which shows whether they are free or busy. When the computer wants to store new information, it looks at the map to find a few free sectors. It then instructs the read-write head to move across the platter to exactly the right place and store the data there. To read the information, the same process is performed in reverse.

How does a computer manage all the mechanical minutiae of a hard drive? Between them there is an interface (communication equipment), called the controller. This is a small circuit that controls the actuators, selects certain tracks for reading and writing, and converts parallel data streams coming from the computer into serial data streams written to disk (and vice versa). The controllers are either built into the drive’s own circuit board or are part of the computer’s main board (motherboard).

With so much information stored in such a tiny space, the hard drive is a remarkable piece of engineering. This gives not only advantages, but also disadvantages. One is that hard drives can fail if dirt or dust gets inside them. A tiny piece of dust can cause the magnetic head to bounce up and down, crashing into the platter and damaging its magnetic material. This is known as disk failure (or head failure) and can, although not always, result in the loss of all information on the hard drive. Disk failure usually occurs suddenly, without warning. This is why you should always keep backup copies of your important documents and files.

Who invented the hard drive?

The evolution of hard drives

Like many innovations in computing in the 20th century, hard drives were invented by IBM as a way to provide computers with “random access” main memory. The problem with other computer memory devices, such as punched cards and magnetic tape reels, was that they could only be accessed sequentially (in order, from start to finish). So if the bit of data you want to get is somewhere in the middle of the tape, you have to read or skim through the entire record quite slowly to find what you need. With a hard drive, everything happens much faster, it can move its read-write head from one part of the disk to another very quickly. The first hard drive was designed by Reynold B. Johnson of IBM and introduced on September 4, 1956 years old as an IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit and it looked nothing like modern models. It weighed 970 kilograms and consisted of 50 aluminum plates coated with a ferromagnet, with a diameter of 61 centimeters.
More or less similar to modern specimens, though not in size, was 3340, which was released in 1973. At the suggestion of IBM engineers who made a device for 30 tracks with 30 sectors in each track, by analogy with the marking of the Winchester carabiner – “30/30”, hard drives began to be called “hard drives”, or abbreviated as “screws”.

Types of hard drives

2.5″ and 3.5″ hard drives

What is the difference between hard drives and which one is better? If you look at the types of HDD, then they are divided into:

• 1. for laptops, they are characterized by a 2.5-inch form factor. This allows them to fit in a small case;
• 2. for computers and video surveillance systems. Although it is possible to use the previous option, as a rule, a 3.5-inch form factor is used;
• 3. external devices connected separately to a PC/laptop, mainly used for information storage;
• 4. for servers, have better performance and SAS rather than SATA connection interface.

In addition, hard drives are divided depending on several characteristics:

• 1. memory size – varies from now from 300 gigabytes to 18 terabytes;
• 2. spindle speed (the more, the higher the productivity) – from 5400 to fast HDD with 15000 rpm;
• 3. interface – SAS 2, SAS 3, SATA 3, others are much less common, for external options the main USB interface;
• 4. buffer size (cache for temporary data storage) – from 8 to 512 megabytes.

Any hard magnetic disk fulfills its main purpose, stores information, all other nuances must be taken into account when choosing for a specific task.

Conclusion

Hard drives have been in production for a long time, they are large and cheap, but they also have many disadvantages. One of the problems is the amount of time it takes for the head to get to the right part of the disk in order to access the information. The large size of the hard drive and its relatively high power consumption are also problems, especially in mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Another issue is reliability. As you may have gathered from what you have just read, HDDs are a fine piece of precision engineering with many intricate moving parts. Therefore, there is always the possibility of a serious mechanical failure, caused by something like dirt on one of the plates or a sudden mechanical shock, after which all information can be lost.

All of these issues—weight, power consumption, access time, and reliability—can be solved with solid-state drives (SSDs), which typically use flash memory instead of rotating magnetic platters. Computer manufacturers have been moving away from hard drives to solid state drives over the past decade, largely due to the move away from desktops towards mobile devices.

When it comes to choosing where to buy hard drives, choose a reliable supplier. AnLan has been a leader in the Russian market since 2007. Reasonable price and European quality is what distinguishes the company’s products from other organizations.

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What is a hard disk drive (HDD)? How does it work?

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Many people know about HDD only that it stores data and is complex. We will talk about it a little more specifically and help you figure out how a hard drive actually works in a computer. And at the end we will answer your questions about him.

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What is a hard drive storage device inside the PC.
Thanks to him, the computer has a memory on which you can store personal data, and
PC – system files necessary for work.

Memory is needed in any computer. In standard assemblies, it is the HDD that takes on the entire load,
but sometimes it works in tandem with an SSD. Then Winchester
stores only user data and programs, while SSD stores OS files. This tandem allows
computer to work faster due to the large amount of free space.

In this case, the hard disk in the computer is responsible for the permanent memory. Unlike RAM, which stores data
temporarily, the HDD records them for a long time until the user himself decides to delete them from the media. That’s why
downloaded photos, games and programs remain on your computer even after you turn it off.

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What a hard drive is made of

If you have ever disassembled a computer or at least looked inside the system unit, you know that
HDD is a round metal plate inside a rectangular case. And if you didn’t look,
then the picture below will help you understand what a hard drive looks like.

UnImages/Shutterstock.com

The attentive reader will notice that in addition to the case and plate, there are other, smaller ones in the device
details. And all of them are important to understand exactly how the HDD works.

Let’s take a closer look at the structure of a hard drive. So, this is what the HDD consists of:

• housing with a lid – HDA, most of the spare parts “live” inside it
  hard drive;

• magnetic plates – there are several of them, and all are located one above the other;

• central spindle – an electric motor that makes the plates rotate;

• magnetic head – a small magnet at the end of the rocker that “runs”
  on the disk and is responsible for writing / reading information on it;

• rocker – metal “arm” that guides the read head to the desired
  disk space;

• drive – a special magnetic block with a coil and a small spindle that drive the rocker
  in motion;

• controller – a board on the back of the case that maintains a constant speed
  spinning disks, is responsible for synchronization with the computer and for many other things. This is the brain of the HDD.

The construction of the drive, rocker and heads – this is what can read
and record information. They are connected to the controller board by a flexible cable. It is for him that information
goes to the “brain” of the device. There it processes all changes, and then reflects
them on your computer, on your screen.

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How a hard disk works

Now that we understand what is inside a hard disk, let’s try to figure it out
in the principle of his work.

You could already guess what exactly is stored on disks – magnetic platters
all the information that we write to the HDD. There may be several of them, from their number
depends on the amount of disk space. Each of them has special circular paths – paths.
And in them there are smaller cells, which are called sectors. It is in them that they are recorded
data.

When the disk needs to read or write information, the spindle spins it up to 7200 revolutions
in a minute. The magnetic head moves along the track of the disk and magnetizes or demagnetizes its sectors.
So she enters information on them in the form of 0 and 1. Ideally, the data is distributed
by neighboring sectors, which will then be easier to find.

But it happens that nearby sectors are occupied, and therefore the head has to look for free cells in another
place. When she writes information for storage, she focuses on something like a map: data that
show which cells are free and which are occupied. So the head “runs”
on the surface of the disk to write or read information.

Interesting

The head may appear to be touching the surface of the disc as it “runs” through the tracks.
But in fact, there is a microscopic gap between them. And it is much less than the thickness of our
hair!

Suppose you want to save a new game to your computer. Let’s find out how the HDD works in this case.

1. You click the “Install” button on your PC.

2. The computer sends a request to the hard drive controller that it needs to write information.

3. The board receives data and processes it.

4. The disk looks for free sectors on the platters, and the drive directs the rocker and head to the desired ones
   places.

5. The head magnetizes and demagnetizes the cells to write information in binary code.

6. The drive is updating its map of free and occupied sectors.

7. The board fixes the end of the recording and informs the computer about it.

8. You see the notification “Installed” on the screen.

In fact, all this is a greatly simplified description of all processes during recording. But our
the goal is to explain them in simple words, and more is not needed to understand the operation of the HDD.
How does a computer work?
device memory. So, you could guess, the hard drives themselves are different, and they differ in different ways.
criteria. For example, by appointment. Let’s break them down in the table below.

Types of HDD by purpose
View	What makes different
For laptops	The drive has a small size, which allows it to fit in a small area inside the laptop. Form factor: 2.5 inches.
For PC	Standard size disc for personal computers, also used for surveillance systems. Form factor: 3.5 inches.
For servers	High performance drives with other connection type. Form factor: 3.5 inches.
External hard drives	Drives that connect to a computer or laptop through external ports.

But that’s not all. HDDs also differ in characteristics. For example:

• by memory size: from 300 GB to 20 TB;

• in terms of disk rotation speed, i. e. in terms of performance: from 5,400
  up to 15,000 rpm;

• by connection type: USB (for external), SAS, SATA;

• in terms of memory for temporary data storage: from 8 to 512 MB.

Answers to frequently asked questions

Now let’s look at what users are most often interested in learning about hard drives.

How is a hard drive different from other types of data storage such as flash drives or cloud storage?

Of course, no other drive can replace the internal HDD. But if we are talking about external hard
disk, then flash cards and cloud storage can already compete with it. Let’s compare them all
according to different criteria.

Comparison of hard drives for PC and laptops
Vault	External HDD	Flash card	Cloud
Synchronization with PC	Yes	No	Yes
Internet addiction	No	No	Yes
Memory size	Up to 20 TB	Up to 4 TB	Up to 3 TB for individuals
Service life	10 years old	10 years old	Infinite if service continues to run
Information overwriting limit	No	Up to 100,000,000	No
Energy consumption	More than flash card	Small	No

How to choose the right hard drive for your computer or laptop?

So you need a new HDD. In order not to miss the choice, decide in advance on its
characteristics. Here’s what you need to pay attention to:

• Form factor . We already wrote above: 3.5″ for PC, 2.5″ for
  laptops.

• Memory size . The standard office version is 1 TB. Better is more
  but without fanaticism. It is unprofitable to take 8 TB and above, unless your HDD is for a server.

• Speed ​​ . Traditionally, it is believed that higher speed = more performance. If you have
  no SSD – this is important. If there is a solid state drive, and the OS is installed on it,
  then not especially.

• Noise level . The criterion seems insignificant, but, believe me, it is better to choose the one that is quieter.
  Preferably up to 35 dB. The saved nerve cells will thank you.

• Cache size . Same advice as for speed.

• Connection interface: SATA 3 . SAS – only for server HDDs.

Manufacturers below.

Which manufacturers are considered the best in the production of hard drives and why?

Today on the market you can find discs from different manufacturers, but you should not miss the first one that comes across.
For some companies, the product is good, for others – frankly bad, and for others –
cat in a bag, how lucky.

Therefore, we advise you to focus on reviews and personal experience. And we will talk about 3 good
manufacturers in the table below.

Top HDD Manufacturers
Name	Description
Western Digital	The undisputed leader of this mini-top. This is an American manufacturer that specializes in on drives. Reviews and tests speak about the quality of their products, but their price appropriate.
Toshiba	A Japanese company that manufactures various types of electronics, including internal and external drives. It does not catch up with WD in terms of quality, but it does not frighten at the price either. Golden mean.
Hitachi	Another Japanese manufacturer. It is approximately on the same level with Toshiba in terms of quality, but not so popular with users.

What problems can occur when using a hard disk and how can they be solved?

Your computer may start to run slower. For example, it takes longer to open programs, saves
etc. Then you can suspect data fragmentation. We have already touched on this topic when we spoke
about the principle of hard disk operation.

Reminder: the magnetic head looks for unoccupied segments on the disk when it wants to write something
new. And these segments are not always next to each other. Then the head has to enter data
chaotically. And when you want to contact them next time, she will look for
them on different parts of the plate, because the segments are far apart. And because of this, the computer
slower reads or writes information.

To fix this, it is important to defragment the drive. This can be done with the help of a special program,
for example, “Optimize Drives” in Windows. She will redistribute the information so that the head has
convenient to read it.

But there may be other problems. We also wrote that the head does not touch the disk track
during work. She does not need this – she works according to the principles of magnetism.
But it may happen that the head still touches the plate. And since the disk is spinning with a large
speed, a scratch will remain on its surface – propyl. This can happen, for example, if you drop
computer. Then the disk will be damaged.

In addition, the HDD may burn out if the computer is suddenly disconnected from electricity. Or just get out of line
due to wear. This is fine. In this case, the disk will need to be changed. And it’s better to keep an eye on him
do it beforehand. So you will have time to transfer data to a new one and not lose them.

What is a central processorRead →

Today we talked about hard drives: we learned their main purpose, disassembled the device
and understand how it all works. It’s great if this article helped you learn something new.

And if you are attracted to technology, applications and websites, we advise you not to bury your interest,
and grow a future profession out of it.