| Hard Drives | | | | and the personal computers hard drive. SCSI |
| Hard drives are the storage medium in desktop and | | | | interfaces provide for faster data transmission rates |
| laptop computers as well as all servers and | | | | (up to 80 megabytes per second) than standard |
| mainframes throughout the world. A hard drive is a | | | | serial and parallel ports which is why SCSI hard drives |
| piece of hardware that reads and writes data on a | | | | are generally more expensive than IDE hard drives. |
| hard disk. Hard disk drives for personal computers | | | | Hard Drives comes in a range of different prices. You |
| generally have seek times of about 12 milliseconds or | | | | can find many discount in hard drives from as little as |
| less. Many hard drives improve their performance | | | | Rs.800 to over Rs.4,00000. Price ranges for hard |
| through a technique called caching. There are several | | | | drives general depend on the manufacturer and the |
| interface standards for passing data between a hard | | | | amount of gigabytes offered with the hard drive. |
| drive and a computer. The most common are IDE | | | | There are many quality manufacturers of hard drives, |
| and SCSI. Although removable disks encased in | | | | like Toshiba, Western Digital, Quantum, Maxtor, |
| cartridges use the same "hard" disk media and a | | | | Seagate, Maxtor, Hatachi, Fujitsu, and many others. |
| similar drive technology, they are mostly called | | | | What does Gigabyte mean? |
| "removable drives" rather than hard drives. | | | | A gigabyte (derived from the SI prefix giga-) is a unit |
| | | | of information or computer storage equal to one |
| IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) a hardware | | | | billion (that is, a thousand million) bytes. One gigabyte |
| interface widely used to connect hard disks, optical | | | | is roughly equal to 18 hours of MP3 music (at 128 kbit |
| disks and tape drives to a PC. Introduced in 1986 | | | | s). One gigabyte is roughly equivalent to 11 hours, 40 |
| with 20MB of storage, capacities increased a | | | | minutes of Flash video (at 450x370). A gigabyte is a |
| thousand fold in less than two decades. Compared to | | | | measure of computer data storage capacity and is |
| the SCSI interface, IDE has been the more | | | | "roughly" a billion bytes. Today's hard drives are much |
| economical choice. IDE is a standard electronic | | | | less expensive than they have ever have been. |
| interface used between a computer motherboard's | | | | Buying a 100 GB is very affordable today but as |
| data paths or bus and the personal computers hard | | | | earlier as 6 years ago it was unheard of. |
| drive. | | | | Hard drives internal and external. |
| SCSI was developed as an industry-wide standard. It | | | | In internal hard drive or external hard drive no matter |
| is used on PC Servers, and was used on Macintosh, | | | | the type of computer you have. An internal hard |
| but it was also designed to handle the heavy load of | | | | drive must be properly installed within the housing of |
| performance critical central servers that cost | | | | the computer. To properly install an external hard |
| hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is better than | | | | drive your computer must connect with a 6-pin or |
| ATA, but more expensive. SCSI is a parallel interface | | | | 4-pin FireWire port to transfer the data between the |
| standard used by motherboard's data paths or bus | | | | motherboard. |