Hard Drives Are NOT All The Same
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,075 words · ~5 min read
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thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos
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even though super fast solid state drives or ssds are all the rage for high
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performance pcs these days you still
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can't beat a good old-fashioned mechanical hard drive if you need lots
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of storage space for not a lot of money but which one do you choose even though
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hard drives are all relatively slow compared to ssds you'll still find that
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they vary in price performance and features and this isn't just due to
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differences in how fast they spin
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although that is a significant factor so
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the spindle speed denoted in RPM is how many times the disc platters rotate per
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minute so all other things being equal then the faster this is the faster data
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can be read and written and the lower the seek times or latency are but all
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other things aren't equal you see for example some hard drives are made to be
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tougher than others you'll often see these marketed as nas grade enterprise
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or surveillance drives the idea is that
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for these kinds of applications the hard drives they don't get to spin down and
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go to sleep like they would if they were installed in a typical desktop they have
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to be up and running around the clock i mean think about how web servers need to
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be able to serve content 24 hours a day or how surveillance cameras have to
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constantly record footage but how exactly do you make a hard drive tougher
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and is this a feature that's worth paying extra for let's start by looking
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at a simple way that drive manufacturers stabilize their server grade products
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they will actually attach the motor that spins the platters to both the top and
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the bottom of the drive's housing consumer hard drives by contrast often
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anchor the motor only to the bottom of the unit this extra stabilization is
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important because nas's and servers typically have many drives spinning and
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clicking away next to each other in close quarters which means more
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vibration higher end drives also try to avoid
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errors with more precise actuators that move the reed and right head around the
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disc they'll incorporate stronger magnets inside that can accelerate the
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head more quickly and the heads themselves will even be narrower this
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means that the empty space between data tracks on the platter can be made
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physically larger giving the drive a larger margin for error in the event
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that something like a sudden physical shock occurs
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and when things do go wrong higher end drives can to an extent compensate for
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mishaps many of these hard drives have built-in sensors that can detect shocks
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vibrations and even temperature changes which will tell the drive to adjust how
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the head positions itself over the platters preventing the drive from
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slowing down too much some of them can even get rid of problematic air bubbles
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that can form inside the fluid dynamic bearings that helped the platters spin
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so that's all pretty cool but if you just need more storage for
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your steam library you probably don't need anything more than a typical
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consumer grade drive as it won't be exposed to either the physical risks or
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the demanding workloads that the more expensive drives are designed for so for
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you the viewer it probably does just come down to
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performance capacity and price
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with that said if you're running a home nas to serve media within your home or
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even over the internet a nas drive is probably going to be a good choice and
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these can even be a good bet if you're running a raid array in your pc since
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the drives tend to be quite close together and nas drives are built to
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withstand vibration or if you know for a fact you're only using this hard drive
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for archival purposes where you'll be writing to it once and then only really
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reading from it over time shingled magnetic storage drives can be a good
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bet they're much slower to write to but their read speeds are more than
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acceptable and they do tend to be cheaper because manufacturers can get
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more density out of the platter by actually overlaying tracks on top of
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each other just like shingles hence the name the last edge case for home users
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is probably surveillance drives which i guess leads us perfectly to another key
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but not very obvious difference from one model to another
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firmware hard drive manufacturers can optimize their devices for better
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performance in certain workloads and surveillance drives are designed to
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handle many simultaneous streams of data concurrently in a way that drives that
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were made to boot your operating system simply can't their read speeds might be
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a little bit slower but a good surveillance drive will make it more
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