Different Types of Hard Drives You Thought You Knew But Didn't (Part 2)

Hello guys,

This is a continuation of where I stopped yesterday, I had to take my time to fully read and understand how they function before I could expound on them scrupulously for easy ingestion. You can start reading it HERE.

5: High Performance or High RPM Drive

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[High RPM Drive -Tomshardware]}

This is another kind of desktop drive but basically, they spin at a much faster speed so whereas a regular desktop hard drive is gonna be about 7200 rpm, a high rpm drive might be either 10,000 or 15,000 rpm.

The reason for that is very simple, the faster the platter spins, the more data it can access at a time and write as well so it's going to be faster read and write times. For example, you had a 15,000 rpm drive, if you were to compare that to a 7200 rpm drive, it would probably be about double the speed like about 200 megabytes per second versus 100. One thing about this drive is that you don't really hear about them as often, they're not really popular anymore because SSDs came along and just blow them out of the water.

People who want to get better performance, SSDs are the way to go, they're way faster, even though you might be able to get like 250 megabytes a second out of a high-performance drive, you can get like 500 plus out of a SSD.

The only advantage of a high rpm drive is they're usually significantly cheaper but I would just go with the SSD because there's so many other benefits but we're talking about hard drives not SSDs.

6: Archival Hard Drive

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[WD Ae Cold Data Storage -Storagereview]}

This is somewhat new type of hard drive I don’t think you’re aware of and I think not many companies specifically make this type. This are drives like Western Digital Ae which are specifically designed for data centers that store a lot of data that isn't really accessed that frequently, it's also called Cold Data Storage so this might be used in a cloud backup where you have customers backing up data and they're backing up all the time, they're not gonna really access it that often but if they do need to access it, they can still access it quickly.

It is also another type of enterprise drives but they are best used if you're not gonna be accessing them super frequently but they need to be able to last long.

7: Hybrid Drive

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[Hybrid Hard Drive -Howtogeek]}

This is final type of drive I’m going to explicate about, it is also similar to desktop drive. You may have already heard of these, it is also called SSHD or Solid-State Hard Drive and they are a combination of flash memory and hard drive.

The idea is that it has a main big drive, it might be 1 or 2 terabytes of magnetic storage and it'll have a smaller cache of flash memory which would be a lot less maybe only 8 gigabytes as opposed to the couple terabytes and what happens with these is that it usually and automatically detect which files on the drive you access most frequently and then it will put those files into the flash memory cache which is much faster so anytime you need to retrieve your most frequent files, you'll be able to get those a lot quicker than if it were to read off a disk.

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[Mode of data retrieval -Wikipedia]}

One thing to note though is that you can't actually choose which files typically go into this cache, it's all done automatically so if you had a few files that you really wanted to be having fast access, you really just have to get a SSD because you can't choose otherwise.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of these hybrid drives, I would rather just go with an SSD but they are significantly cheaper than an SSD so I guess if you really don't want to spend the extra money, this might be something that you can at least try out.

Conclusion

I think those are just a bunch of different types of hard drives maybe you didn't know that there were such a variety but I think for most people, the only ones they are gonna be interested in are desktop drives and maybe even Solid-State Drives which I wrote about before.

In any case, I would like to know you guys think, do you still use hard drives? Do you prefer them because you don't want to spend as much money? you can let me know by replying this post. If you enjoyed this article, don’t hesitate to smash that upvote button below. Have a great week ahead.

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References: 1 - 2 - 3

Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

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_{GIF made by @foundation}

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Thanks to @camzy for this amazing toon.