All about your Hard Disk Drive (hdd)

 
 

 

Pictured:  Maxtor 7200rpm 160GB HDD

 
 
 
 

When purchasing a drive you will hear a few phrases like IDE, EIDE, SCSI, Ultra DMA 133 and 7200rpm, so lets explain what these are.

IDE and SCSI refer to the connector on your motherboard that connects to the hard drive. All new motherboards have IDE connectors and are the most popular type of drive EIDE means enhanced IDE, backward compatible with the IDE cable they provide faster performance if used with a EIDE motherboard and cable. The SCSI drives are fast and therefore are mainly only used in large servers, they require the use of a SCSI card. Ultra DMA refers to the transfer speed of your drive. Ultra DMA 33 drives are the older and slower drives while Ultra DMA 133 drives are the latest and faster type, If you buy a ultra DMA 133 drive for your old motherboard it may not support this speed, it will still work but only at say ultra DMA 100 speed.

SATA is a new form of cable system that is unlike IDE, SATA means serial ATA and is tipped to overtake IDE drives in years to come, if you are buying a new motherboard it would be a wise idea to pick one that can support the SATA drives.

The RPM number refers to platter rotation speed and refers to how fast the drive spins the faster the rotation speed the faster the drive is. 5400 RPM is the most common speed with 7200 RPM drives becoming cheaper and therefore popular.

The other numbers you will find are Gb or gigabyte, the smallest you will find new today would be 20Gb as 10 and 15 Gig drives are becoming hard to find, the reason for this is probably due to the fact that the price of drives are getting cheap. A 30 gig drive may only cost 10 or 20 dollars more than a 20 gig drive, so get the biggest you can afford. How big is 20 gig you may ask, well to simplify things lets look at a floppy disk, it holds 1.44Mb (Megabyte), lets put a 1 meg file on the disk. To get to just 1 gig you would need 1000 disks and 20 gig you would need 20000 floppy disks.

 
 
  Introduction
  The computer case
  The motherboard
  CPU Guide
  Installing the CPU
  Memory Guide
  Installing the Memory
  Hard Disk Guide
  CD and DVD Drive Guide
  Installing a Hard Disk or CD Drive
  Video Card Guide
 

More of this Article

Introduction
The computer case
The motherboard
CPU Guide
Installing the CPU
Memory Guide
Installing the Memory
Hard Disk Guide
CD and DVD Drive Guide
Installing CD or Hard Drive
Video Card Guide
 
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The information presented here is for a guide only. If at all you doubt your technical abilities
do not attempt to perform the procedures documented here. We will not be held responsible
for any damage to your equipment or injury to yourself.
 

 

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