To choose the right HDD, it is necessary to initially determine the purpose of its application. Firstly, the choice may be related to the installation of the operating system on the hard drive. Secondly, a hard drive can be used to store data, i.e. music, videos, photos, etc.

In addition, it must be borne in mind that for the desktop computer system disks of such a form factor as 3.5 inches are intended, and for laptops - models of 2.5 inches. You also need to decide on the desired capacity. If you plan to use only one hard drive, then it is advisable to purchase it with the maximum possible volume.

Hard disk platters

To date, hard drives have in their composition from 1 to 4 plates. In this case, the correct choice corresponds to the option where there is one plate. This is due to the fact that:

• one plate allows for faster reading of information. In addition, the performance of the OS depends on the positioning of the heads, so in this case it will be higher;
• a single platter means fewer mechanical parts. Based on this, the risk of breakdowns is reduced and the noise level is significantly reduced;
• less heat dissipation will extend the life of the drive in question.

HDD spindle speed

Typically, spindle rotation is determined by indicators such as 5400 and 7200 rpm. Higher revolutions are usually noted in those hard drives, which are part of the servers. There are also models where revolutions per minute can be determined by any value from 5400 to 7200.

In turn, a high rotational speed can significantly speed up the processing of such parameters as reading and writing information. At the same time, discs with a lower rotation speed are characterized by a quieter operation mode. If it is planned to install an operating system on the HDD, then it is worth choosing those options that are characterized by an indicator of 7200 rpm. Otherwise, a speed mode of 5400 rpm is quite suitable.

So is the constant.

Naturally, the possibility of saving one or another amount of information depends on the capacity of the drive. In this article we will talk about a relatively simple and logical, but for many rather ambiguous characteristics of capacity (volume) hard drive. Namely, how much hard disk space should you choose for your system.

Hard disk capacity is a measure of the maximum amount of information that your hard disk can hold. At the moment, hard drives from 80 GB to 4000 GB (4 TB) are common.

Let's take a look at what is currently the maximum and optimal storage capacity of an average home system among drives available in stores.

If you briefly analyze the drives presented in several online stores computer technology, it is quite clearly seen that the maximum is somewhere around the capacity of 3-4 TB. The cost of such pleasure is on average $300-400. It cannot be said that such voluminous hard drives will appeal to a wide range of users, in view of their not very friendly price. And why does an ordinary user need a 4 TB hard drive? For vacation photos?

In general, we come to the conclusion that such a capacity will be superfluous and is needed only for specific requirements. Still, it cannot be denied that there are lovers of rather strange collecting of films of 10-30 GB. Or those who actually need to store the source, for example, uncompressed video segments after editing. If we take Adobe after effects, then the finished file after rendering A 3-minute video on a standard codec (in AVI format) can take about 50 GB. So for lovers of uncompressed video files, you may even need RAID array from several such hard drives.

Let's return to the analysis of the capacity of drives presented in online stores and see that the most popular class (as you know, demand generates supply) are 500 GB - 1 TB drives.

As for me, for a typical home system, 500 GB is more than enough. This is if you do not have the above described passion for collecting movies on your hard drive. In any case, the complete package installed programs you will take no more than 60 GB. Music will most likely "float" within 10-40 GB. You can also allocate about 50 GB for photos and home video, if you shoot a lot, then you can use 100-150. Also, about 70-90 GB for games (for avid gamers) and residual files of various types. In total, after several years of active use of hard disk resources, you will have only 250 GB occupied, and the remaining 250 will simply be empty. By the way, I recommend using special software for hard drive testing to avoid loss of information. In general, as we can see, for those who are especially economical, the option with hard drive for 250 or 320 GB.

I would like to note that everything here is purely individual, but the above calculations will more than cover the needs of the average user. Before buying, you just need to think about what you will store there, but even if a mistake is made in these approximate calculations, nothing prevents you from buying another hard drive (in the case of a desktop). In the case of a laptop, you can easily use an external drive.

Here are the arguments regarding the capacity of the hard drive. In the end, the final choice of volume, of course, is yours.

This article was an introduction to a series of articles on hard drive characteristics, the rest of which we will cover in detail in subsequent articles.

Thanks to the constant improvement of technology, the unit cost of solid-state drives is steadily declining, while their volume and resource, on the contrary, are growing. Despite this, hard drives will be relevant for quite a long time and manufacturers do not stop in an effort to improve their performance.

Actually, the design of the HDD has not fundamentally changed for a long time - inside the sealed case, from one to four light round plates rotate, and several magnetic heads move above them and write / read information. The efforts of manufacturing companies are aimed at modernizing the attachment points of moving elements, selecting the composition of the ferromagnetic layer on the disks, improving the parameters of the drive and heads, as well as optimizing the algorithms for managing this entire economy.

The most important selection criteria

Geometric dimensions

The term “form factor” is more commonly used, but there is one caveat. There are two main HDD sizes: 3.5 inches for desktops and 2.5 inches for laptops. As a rule, the thickness of the drive depends on the number of platters, and if its value does not matter much for desktop PCs, then portable devices it can play a decisive role. Ultra-thin laptops are designed to install 7 or even 5 mm hard drives, while the most widely used devices are 9.5 mm thick.

Purpose of the hard drive

Perhaps the most important criterion is the purpose of the hard drive. If its main task is to storage of various information- the requirements for the amount of disk space and unit cost come to the fore. Currently the best choice here are drives with a capacity of 2-4 TB with low energy consumption. At the same time, special attention is not paid to the speed of rotation of the plates. For a HDD of this category, it is usually 5400 rpm, but it can be higher. For responsible data storage drives are organized into RAID arrays, and reliability is added to the requirements, expressed in terms of device time between failures. Hard drives for corporate sector have an expanded set of design features that increase the "survivability" of the HDD and the corresponding cost. NAS drives are required to be instantly ready for exchange at any time, so the firmware for their controllers is modified accordingly, usually at the expense of energy efficiency.

System drives should provide maximum read and, to a lesser extent, write speed. Their distinguishing feature is a higher plate speed (7200 rpm and more), and a side effect of intensive engine operation is increased heat and noise. Of course, you need to focus on disks with the most productive interface that supports motherboard(currently SATA III). In operating rooms Windows systems XP and Windows 7 had problems with large boot partitions, therefore, as system drives, 3 GB and above were used with this factor in mind. A kind of compromise between the affordable cost of HDDs and the high performance of SSDs are hybrid devices. In single-disk workstations or laptops, such drives can significantly increase the speed of loading the operating system.

Volume

At choosing hard disk Special attention always refer to its volume. It is its lack in most cases that is the driving reason for the purchase. From the point of view of the cost of a unit of information storage, the most profitable HDD with a capacity of 2 or 4 TB for desktop systems and terabyte for mobile devices. Preference should be given to discs with fewer platters. Having a higher recording density, such media also provide a higher exchange rate, and the device itself heats up less during operation.

Photo: domcomputer.ru

Other characteristics

• Up to date interfaces are SATA III for consumer applications and SAS for servers. Rigid ones are also on sale. SATA drives II. While remaining fully compatible in terms of connectivity, they have half the bandwidth of the interfaces of the third revision of this standard. Legacy hardware may require parallel bus (PATA - aka IDE) drives.
• The higher read/write speed, the faster the data will be exchanged with the disk. It should only be borne in mind that manufacturers like to indicate in the characteristics the maximum values ​​\u200b\u200breached ideally. In fact, the speed decreases as the heads get closer to the center of the platter and depends on the size of the data block and a host of other things. For example, in real conditions, the exchange almost always goes both ways. Typical maximum values ​​for drives with SATA interface III are in the range from 130 to 180 Mb/s.
• Plate rotation speed is important if maximum performance is required, even at the expense of other parameters. For drives oriented to other tasks, its value may be variable or not indicated by manufacturers.
• To a certain extent, speed up the performance of the hard drive allows you to cache memory. During the reading process, data from adjacent blocks is also retrieved and placed in a special buffer in the expectation that they will be required the next time the drive is accessed. When reading a large array, this always has a positive effect. The larger the cache, the more noticeable the performance increase - this was one of the reasons for the creation of hybrid devices. The flip side of the coin is the increased cost and complexity of read/write coordination.
• Power consumption indirectly characterizes the probable heating of the HDD. High-speed drives are expected to be more voracious and more heated, while economical and relatively cool ones are their slow counterparts. In read / write modes, the former consume power from 8 to 12 W, the latter require 4-5. 2.5" hard drives are much more modest in their appetites, 2-3 W are enough for them. Of particular interest is the amount of consumption at rest, which serves as a clear indicator of the device's energy efficiency.

Main manufacturers

Hard drives are quite a high-tech product, so initially a small number of companies specializing in their release is constantly decreasing. The most demanded hard drives produced Western Digital, Seagate Technology, Hitachi Global Storage technologies (HGST) and, to a lesser extent, Samsung Electronics. In the 2.5-inch HDD segment, products are very popular Toshiba Corporation, and the drives of this company serve as the basis for 2/3 of external hard drives produced under other brands.

Photo: www.komposervis.ru

When purchasing an HDD, first of all, start from how it will be used. Installed on disks of the "green" series operating system will be slower to load than it could be. The speed of data exchange with fast drives will please the heart, if you forget about their cost. The loss of information can significantly complicate life, so serious matters should be trusted only to hard drives with increased reliability.

When choosing a hard drive for a laptop, do not forget to pay attention to the size. The thinner mobile device, the more likely it is to install a Thin or Ultrathin drive. On the other hand, the HDD compartment of almost any laptop has one or another shock resistance system, which is based on installing a disk surrounded by damping material. good option here will be the purchase of a hard drive, which includes a special thickening pad.

When planning to buy a hard drive of the required capacity, remember that the value indicated by the manufacturer and real capacity a formatted drive is, as they say in Odessa, two big differences. As a rule, hard drives indicate the capacity in billions (G) or trillions (T) bytes. And since one terabyte consists of 1,099,511,627,776 minimally addressable data sets (1024 to the 4th power), then the volume in the corresponding units is less.