It's A Hard Drive's Night
| Published 10/08/04
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This quote holds true even to this day. One might take a look back at the olden days of computers when you only had 512 KB of RAM and 100 MB of hard drive space seemed like a lot. My first computer was a Pentium 486 DX 66 MHz (with 16 MB of RAM, a floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive, a tape drive, and a 500 MB hard drive). Those were the days when software wouldn't run, because it didn't like which driver you were using for your tape drive -- even if they didn't have anything to do with each other. Let's think about those days for just one moment; think about the software that was around and what people used them for. I know that you couldn't play movies on them or do much in the way of music, but you could word process and make spreadsheets. Excel 3.0 would make a nice little graph if you could coerce it into doing so. Realize one thing: Windows 3.1, Microsoft Office, Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD R12, Paint (one of the best graphics programs ever made) and about a bazillion little games were able to fit into one hard drive that was only 500 megabytes and still have room to spare for documents. How much room does all the same programs take up on my computer today? Windows XP takes up 2.2 GB; AutoCAD - 1.25 GB; MS Office - 0.5 GB. This is a grand total of 3.95 GB. ThatĚs about 4 gigabytes, which is about 8 times as much space as the entire hard drive I had in my first computer. From all this information there are two conclusions: 1) The software people are putting lots of filler in their programs so we have to upgrade our hard drives 2) Hard drives really haven't gotten any bigger, they just say that they have There are several different types of hard drives: MFM, RLL, IDE, EIDE, ATA, ESDI, and SCSI hard drives. Each one has their own peculiarities which are detailed at the following site: Indiana University Knowledge Base. The most commonly used drive is IDE in older computers and EIDE in newer ones. The latest and greatest drives use something called "Serial ATA," which replaces the outdated ribbon-style connectors. There are several things to look for when it comes to picking out a hard drive. The most important is compatibility The hard drive must be compatible with your motherboard. If you don't know how to tell which type of hard drive you have and the drive itself is not marked, then have someone else determine the type. Next is the RPM and seek speed. These items refer to how fast the computer can access data on the hard drive, which relates to how fast programs load directly from the hard drive. There is also a cache directly on most hard drives which acts as miniature RAM, once again helping programs to load faster. |
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