Pro IT Zone

Have you noticed technology is changing? Wherever you look everything is becoming faster, smarter, and easier to use. But, one of the things that have stayed constant ever since the first personal computers with internal hard drives were created is the design and manufacture of hard drives.

Believe it or not, the first personal computers did not have hard drives. In fact they were limited to 5.25 inch floppy disks containing a maximum of 360 KB. Now you may hear talk about 8 inch disks but they were mainly for company size computer applications.

The IBM personal computer used the 5.25, and it was considered that most applications would only need one of these discs, ever. A friend’s first computer had two of these drives and then he installed a hard drive, so he did not need to spend half of his life changing disks. That was around 1978. The hard drives may have shrunken in size but the technology of a number of disks coated in magnetic oxide has not changed until now.

We now have the choice of solid state discs. You might be wondering what does this mean. Simply put, it means no moving parts. It means that you can no longer have your hard disc destroyed by putting it in a magnet. You cannot hurt the hard disk by putting a magnet on the side of the computer to attach a drawing or a note to your computer (yes another friend found this at the company he worked in.)

Also, the hard drive cannot be hurt as easily by dropping it. If you drop it far enough or hard enough then you will do some damage, but the magnetic hard disk would have been destroyed by such a fall.

Samsung have brought out a Solid State Disc (SSD,) that they can produce at a reasonable price. It is still more expensive than a conventional hard drive but will start to compete on price very soon. The advantages are that this disc is silent. It is ideal to use it in places where quietness is high on the agenda. It will use less power, which means it will not need the disc to be stopped as with a conventional disc drive in a notebook PC. This will in turn make the notebook PCs compete in terms of speed with a desktop.

Desktop PCs have always had the advantage of the hard disc spinning at the right speed as soon as the machine starts and continuing to spin at that speed while the computer remains on. Notebook computers have to stop and start the hard drive to keep the battery life as long as possible, leading to the hard drive not lasting as long.

Look out for SSD drives in your computers soon.

Hardware