Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Hard drive technology


Computer hard drive technology has come a long way. Gone are the days of Megabyte hard drives now Giga even Terabyte are common place and yet even still expect soon to see totally solid state as a norm with will allow the PC or laptop to be shrunken.. For those of you who remember floppy disk, think of a hard drive as a self contained BOX with multiply floppy disks inside needing a connection to the system and power. The evolution of this mechanical technology was as follows 

  • SCSI - Small Computer System Interface (Parallel)
  • IDE - integrated development environment (Parallel)
  • EIDE – Enhanced integrated development environment (Parallel)
  • SATA – Serial Advanced Technology Attachment  (non-Parallel) 

Now a new generation of devices are still in their infancy - SSD - solid-state drive This about a huge flash (memory) stick. Because there are not moving parts it does not have the vulnerabilities of mechanical devices but it does have its limitations much like the early hard drives. 

Each generation offers faster performance, more storage, and more stability. 

I know you are wondering if this is so great why do servers use SCSI more often than not still today – simple really fault tolerance – due to the high traffic and information demand on servers you want a hard drive that overlooks minor errors and handles them more easily. This is also the advantage other than speed of most RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) arrays. 

Note: picture source

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