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Drive Spin
Backup! External Hard Drives
With the passage of time external hard drives, in comparison with internal hard drives have acquired a reputation of their own especially in the area of data storage. No doubt every computer is already equipped with a hard drive, but there are various factors involved which necessitate the provision of an external hard drive.
The use of external hard drives today has become indispensable. One of the important factors which influence the need of an external hard drive is online security threats while surfing the internet. Moreover, other factors like protection of sensitive data from unscrupulous elements and the requirements of modern mammoth sized multimedia files demand for external hard drives. External hard drives have the flexibility of being tucked easily outside the main computer. A majority of these drives contain independent cooling fans as well and are connected to the computer interface by way of USB or FireWire.
The advantage of having external hard drives can be gauged by the fact that it helps a user to back up and store important data viz., large music files, movies, DVD images, back ups of the computer softwares while being transported to any place where the user intends to go.
A majority of external hard drives are mostly plug-and-play. As most of the hard drives are available in two formats of SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) which is a faster form of data transfer and with IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) which uses the commonly available 40-pin connection. But external hard drives sometimes utilize two Platters (the actual discs inside the external drives), spindles and spindle motors, read and write heads and head actuators. The platter of the external hard drive spins at speeds of 3600 to 7200 rpm. There is one head attached per platter side and every head is sticked to a single actuator shaft.
Highest-capacity external hard drives have a potential of 2 terabytes, they depend mostly on external AC supply for power. The portable external hard drives or “USB drives” have a capacity of 6 GB to 320 GB and are usually connected via USB cable. Because of their small size they pull their power through a USB port, thus there is no need for an external power supply. Apart from USB and FireWire connections one of the newest connectivity methods being used today is eSATA – External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. It is a variation of SATA. It allows faster transfer speeds of data to the tune of 3 gigabits per second.
There are various companies involved in offering a variety of external hard drives in different shapes and prices viz., Seagate FreeAgent Pro, Seagate FreeAgent Go, HP Media Vault MV2120, Western Digital My Passport Essential 320 GB USB Hard Drive, Iomega 34615 320 GB
About the Author
Sophie Milch currently manages purchasing and inventory control for Comnauts.com. Sophie keeps herself busy by making sure our inventory is filled with quality products, the latest and the greatest. Sophie holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and is frequent contributor to several technology blogs and magazines. When she’s not working; in typical nerd fashion you can catch Sophie twittering friends, beating down Murlocs in World of Warcraft and watching re-runs of the X-files.
Why doesn't my hard drive spin to it's potential?
I bought a SATA 3.5" Barracuda 1TB Hard Drive from Seagate and installed it in my iMac. It says 7200 RPM on it but when I look under istat widget it spins at the same 1200ish RPM that my old stock HD did. So what's the point of the 7200rpm if it won't spin that fast? Just curious.
Ken has the right idea.
The spin rate is max RPM. But many times the drive is jumping all over and grabbing bits and pieces of data and never gets all the way up to speed. Most of the time is spent seeking the TOC and jumping over to the data. The actual read time is usually minimal.
But, 7200 always performs better.
The only exception I found is on slow connections like USB or Firewire (vs SATA). You will never see the speed on those connections.
Not until Windows 7.5 anyway.
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