Hard Drives Essays - Computer Storage Media,

Hard Drives Hard Drives In this day and age of faster computers and high-speed processors, it should only stand to reason that hard drives meet the same requirements as the rest of the computer technology world. A technological look and some tips on maintaining or troubleshooting hard drives is included below. By keeping up with the standard of needs of the industry we can be assured that our personal computers will have all the necessary space and the ability to access and save the data as required and in an efficient manner. The new DiamondMax? Plus 40 series from Maxtor can unleash your computer power with advanced technology and performance. Available in capacities up to 40 GB, these 7,200 RPM drives include Maxtor's unique DualWave? twin processor technology for a 10x boost in host command processing speed. Coupled with 2 MB of high speed 100 MHz SDRAM for the cache buffer and an UltraDMA 66 interface, give our DualWave-equipped hard drives superior benchmark performance and maximum throughput. As a result, they're an ideal choice for consumers working with large files, including audio and video applications. No matter how demanding your application, the new DiamondMax Plus 40 series delivers the ultimate in performance and capacity. With the popularity of multimedia, Internet and audio/video applications, more performance is demanded from desktop PC systems than ever before. System vendors are looking at all sub-components, including hard drives, as critical elements in increasing system speed and performance. As we go forward every part of the system will be called upon to improve throughput. The hard drive is a critical element in system performance, influencing how fast windows or Mac OS boots, how quickly applications launch, and the speed of loading large data or graphics files. Any operation that involves moving large amounts of information on or off the disk will reveal the importance of a high-performance hard drive. Many top PC manufacturers are expanding the use of 7200 RPM drives across all platforms and market segments. The performance achieved by 7200 RPM IDE drives also have made these drives a viable alternative to SCSI in traditional SCSI applications such as server and entry-level RAID. According to analysts at IDC, total worldwide shipments of 7200 RPM IDE drives is expected to be 16% of all IDE drives by the end of this year. This number is expected to be approximately 75% by the year 2002. The newly introduced DiamondMax? Plus 40 hard drives feature a 7200 RPM rotational speed along with other performance-enhancing features that generate faster overall system response times and performance. A Viable Alternative to SCSI,IDE 7200 RPM drives have made their way into the storage-intensive environment of graphic and video applications. The ability to achieve fast-sustained throughput is essential in high-end graphics and digital video content creation. 7200 RPM drives establish a new price/performance ratio in the professional graphic and digital video marketplace when compared to the SCSI alternative. Maxtor's 7200 RPM IDE drives incorporate a larger buffer to provide high-sustained data transfer rates that are important when working with large files such as multimedia and video. Maxtor is a leader in caching technology, employing sophisticated algorithms similar to those found in high-end SCSI drives. Maxtor's drives feature a 2 MB cache buffer incorporating a high-speed 100 MHz SDRAM memory, the same sort of memory found on today's high performance systems. Maxtor's 7200 RPM drives were the first IDE drives to be featured in a RAID level 5 configuration in an uncompressed nonlinear video editing system. The drive's high storage capacity, reliability and performance are well suited for this application. RAID level 5 provides protection against drive failures because in the event of a failure, the drive can be replaced without loss of data. This is especially critical in the video editing process, where 1 GB of storage typically holds approximately 1 minute of uncompressed video. The new DiamondMax Plus 40 drives include Maxtor's MaxSafe and ShockBlock reliability feature set for added protection against surface scan errors and shock and handling damage. This reliability set, when incorporated into a RAID level 5 configuration provides users in this market with unsurpassed protection against drive failures and potential loss from expensive downtime and data loss. The editorial community is taking notice of the SCSI-level performance that is achieved by today's 7200 RPM IDE drives. In a recent product evaluation of Maxtor's 7200 RPM drive published at Winmag.com, the reviewers tested the drive's performance using an internally-developed benchmark. The results were impressive. In the copy test, the drive copied at 3.29 MB/sec., surpassing the results of a competitive SCSI-2