Internal and external storage solutions
Today’s quick lesson regarding hard drive lingo and shopping is related to some performance aspects which you should take into consideration when purchasing and determining the value of different storage solutions on the market place. The three important feature measurements of a storage system are data rate, seek time and capacity.
Data rate is the number of bytes per second that the drive can transfer to the CPU. This is important if you are intending on using the data stored on the external drive regularly as you don’t want to be waiting around for a long time for data to transfer from your hard drive to CPU.
Seek time is the amount of time between when the CPU requests a file and when the first byte of the file is sent to the CPU. Again, if you’re accessing files stored on your external hard drive regularly seek time will dictate how long you’ll be waiting to find the information stored on your external drive.
Capacity is an indication of the amount of storage space on your hard drive. There are many different ways to configure and organize your total storage capacity to ensure safe back-ups, this can be organized with multiple drives and networks. Although for the average home use punter RAID configurations probably aren’t necessary.
There are various ways of boasting the storage capacity of your home computer. Depending on your needs and budgets you can get a portable external drive, an external hard drive or an additional internal hard drive.
If moving about and tranfering large-ish amounts of information is necessary. A portable external drive is a great option. These are things like flash drives and are easy ways for transporting files from desktop to desktop.
The internal and external hard drives are more permanent solutions. An external hard drive is a good way of increasing the total storage capacity of your computer with the ease of a quick USB or firewire connection and the sacrifice of a small amount of desk space. An external drive an boost capacity from anything around 50GB to 2 TB. Internal hard drives involve a bit more playing around but are a cheaper and more compact way of increasing a computer's storage. You'll need some sort of casing to house the drive in, but will have the flexibility of adding more drives and capacity as you need or configuring an elaborate back-up system.
Data rate is the number of bytes per second that the drive can transfer to the CPU. This is important if you are intending on using the data stored on the external drive regularly as you don’t want to be waiting around for a long time for data to transfer from your hard drive to CPU.
Seek time is the amount of time between when the CPU requests a file and when the first byte of the file is sent to the CPU. Again, if you’re accessing files stored on your external hard drive regularly seek time will dictate how long you’ll be waiting to find the information stored on your external drive.
Capacity is an indication of the amount of storage space on your hard drive. There are many different ways to configure and organize your total storage capacity to ensure safe back-ups, this can be organized with multiple drives and networks. Although for the average home use punter RAID configurations probably aren’t necessary.
There are various ways of boasting the storage capacity of your home computer. Depending on your needs and budgets you can get a portable external drive, an external hard drive or an additional internal hard drive.
If moving about and tranfering large-ish amounts of information is necessary. A portable external drive is a great option. These are things like flash drives and are easy ways for transporting files from desktop to desktop.
The internal and external hard drives are more permanent solutions. An external hard drive is a good way of increasing the total storage capacity of your computer with the ease of a quick USB or firewire connection and the sacrifice of a small amount of desk space. An external drive an boost capacity from anything around 50GB to 2 TB. Internal hard drives involve a bit more playing around but are a cheaper and more compact way of increasing a computer's storage. You'll need some sort of casing to house the drive in, but will have the flexibility of adding more drives and capacity as you need or configuring an elaborate back-up system.
