The Insides of a Computer - What everything means
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Storage: Hard Drives and CD/DVD Burners:
When it comes to keeping your files and all of your music, you will rely heavily on your hard drive and a CD or DVD burner to back everything up on removable media. Hard drives and burners come in two interfaces: PATA (parallel serial advanced technology attachment also known as IDE or integrated drive electronics) and SATA (serial ATA). SATA has become increasingly popular due to the faster transfer rates from the hard drive to the motherboard while IDE drives are becoming scarce by the day. Hard drives also come in a SCSI (small computer system interface) interface but it is generally reserved for computer servers or very high end users.
http://www.knudde.be/ide_vs_scsi/ide.jpeg
IDE Connector
http://www.hardwarezone.com/img/data/articles/2004/1018/interface.jpg
SATA Connector
There are two SATA interfaces of hard drives: SATA 1.5 and SATA 3.0; each SATA notation referring to the data transfer rate speed of 1.5Gbit/s and 3.0Gbit/s respectively. Here, the faster the better but there are also different flavors to SATA hard drives. Not only are there differences in capacity (size such as 500GB or 750GB), but there are differences in disk speed (speed at which the disks in the hard drive spin at) as well as cache size (yes, hard drives and burners have built in caches for an increased speed boost).Aside from physical spinning hard drives, there are also solid state drives (SSD) which are drives consisting of flash memory. SSDs are the fastest of the all the hard drives since there are no moving parts.
The other major storage drive is the CD/DVD burner. There have not been many changes to the platforms of a burner as DVD burners have become the staple of all new computers. There are some advancement to the burning speeds and cache size, but the only other improvement is the addition of a Blue-ray burner (the high def DVD platform).
Finally there are flash drives. USB Flash drives are one of the best inventions made for computers (IMHO). Their small profile and large capacities (yes there are 32GB flash drives) make it easy for people to transfer data at high speeds or to back up important documents.
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