Introduction

No single component failure can be as absolutely frustrating and screw you more than a hard drive failure. When I say failure, I mean crash, like it's down for good. Game over, man. I will go out on a limb and say this. Sure, we've all had bad RAM, a bad mobo, or even a bad CPU sometimes (or one that did not overclock to our heart's desire). Well, in these cases, the worst that usually happens is that our system is down, and we have to take the time to diagnose the problem. In some cases, we may even be able to fix the problem. The net of it is that we have a little down time, we have to shell out a few bucks, and then we're ok again.

A hard drive crash is a little different. I went through one recently, so all of you readers out there that have had a hard drive crash on you, and don't back up your system REGULARLY, I feel your pain. Man, I was so p'd. I lost all of my data, including all those MP3's, games, etc. Needless to say, I've learned my lesson with scheduled backups and proper drive maintenance.

The Performance Edge

What that little anecdote brings me to is this: We gamers usually are looking for that performance edge, or that component that will enhance our overall experience. Most of the time this deals with components that provide an output, or feedback, to us, as in some kind of 3D sound, or a Voodoo SLI or TNT setup. This also includes mobos and CPU, because the performance benefits are obviously there with upgrades.

However, there are components (like RAM) that are overlooked in the equation. While RAM can offer a performance benefit as well, the more important issue that we have to focus on is that good RAM is necessary for the proper functioning of your system. Its operations are usually transparent to us, because we don't see the operations happening. This is also like the hard drive, sort of. Although the hard drive's operations are somewhat transparent to us, except for the LED that shows when it's being accessed, hard drives can offer noticeable performance gains.

Everything Needs the Hard Drive

This is logical, of course. Since any application, game, or program that you run must at some point access the hard drive, the amount of time it takes the hard drive to transfer the data over is waiting time. If you lower this time, you will have faster hard drive accesses on everything that is read from the hard drive, and that's a lot of stuff! There's not much chance on a home PC that your RAM size is large enough to cache everything that is required for a program. This is because the chipsets that we use don't support the amount required. But I digress... Hard drives have made tremendous strides over the years, in terms of both performance and price. Performance has gone up, and price has gone waaayyy down!

We here at FiringSquad have decided to step in again with our How to series of guides. We'll show you the basics of hard drive operation, and what determines the speed of a drive. Also, what are the differences in the hard drives out there? There are a whole variety of features that are offered. Plus, there are a bunch of interfaces out there, including the newer ATA-66 and Ultra-2 Wide SCSI. We'll explain all of this, and hopefully more! There is A LOT of info related to hard drives. I will cover current info so this article doesn't become a dissertation. Any questions not covered in this article can be directed to me.