Storing Data

How to cram more stuff in?

Now because there are so many mechanical components, progress has been great in hard drives because refinements can be made to each of these parts. I will talk about the progress that has been made to improve some of these parts. This is just for you all to get an idea of what kind of technology increases are necessary to get better performance. First, I will talk about improvements in platter technology.

Filling up your platters

Since data is physically stored on the platter, adding more platters obviously gives you more storage space, as well as increasing the size of the platter. However, the trade-off here is getting physically larger than a feasible size for a desktop PC vs. getting as much storage as you can. Also, when you add more platters, you need to consider that there is more strain on the spindle motor, which makes the platters spin. I believe that typically hard drives for home PC's go anywhere from 2-4 platters. Increasing platter size also gives you more storage, by allowing more area on each platter to store data.

The trade-off here, again, is that you can't go too big on the platters because the standard bays in cases will only fit 3.5" or 5.25" hard drives. Anything else would require some kind of special case or installation. The advantage, however, is that you can get more programs, applications, MP3's, etc. on to your computer. If you're an impatient gamer like me, and hate waiting around for CD accesses, and you always go for the largest install possible in whatever application or game so it will read directly off of your hard drive, then you know what I'm talking about. Of course, there is the price factor, too, with bigger hard drives.

Do your hard drives shrink in storage capacity after you buy them?

Initially, I had this paragraph as one of the "quick facts" along the right side but came across this issue recently in the message boards, so decided to put it in here. Basically, somebody posted on the message board that he had purchased a 10 GB drive, and when he brought it home and formatted it, the drive was only 9.3 GB! (Something along those lines) What happened to the extra space? Well, this addresses a quirky problem with hard drive size measurement.

It's because of the standard of measurement that is used to determine how big a megabyte or gigabyte is. There is binary measurement, based on powers of 2. 2 to the 10th power = 1,024, which is called a kilobyte. Similarly, a megabyte is 2 to the 20th power (1,048,576), and a gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824). However there is also decimal measurement, which is based on powers of 10. 10 to the 3rd power = 1000, also called a kilobyte.