Nowadays, hard drive is widely used by both individuals and businesses for data storage. Therefore, a good hard drive is badly needed. Now this post will show you 6 vital factors which is influencing hard drive performance.
It is an unquestioned fact that when a hard drive fails, the data stored in it will be prone to corruption, such as corrupt PST data. With no doubt, no one is willing to accept such data loss due to hard drive failure. In general, to block a hard drive from failure, we always suggest that users should take good care of the hard drive. Actually, aside from human operations, the quality of hard drive will make effects in this respect as well. More specifically, a hard drive in poor quality will be more prone to fail and suffer data loss than a high-quality drive. Thereby, about how to determine if a hard drive is good, you can refer to the following 6 vital elements.
1. Actual Capacity
Capacity is one of the most significant parameters of a hard drive since it’s widely used for data storage. As we know, 1GB is 1024MB and 1TB is 1024GB. However, a lot of manufacturers usually treat 1GB as 1000MB when developing their drives. Hence, you may see that the actual capacity of a drive is not as large as what it boasts.
2. Transfer Rate
Transfer rate refers to the data read/write speed of a hard drive. It can be divided into internal transfer rate and external transfer rate. The former one suggests the hard drive performance when buffer is unused. And the latter is reflecting data transfer speed between drive buffer and system bus.
3. Rotational Speed
Rotational speed usually refers to the maximum amount of revolutions that hard drive platter can complete in one minute, namely revolutions per minute (RPM). Thus, it is also an extremely important factor which is affecting the internal hard drive transfer rate.
4. Cache
Cache is virtually a memory chip in hard drive. When accessing data, the data will be exchanged between drive and memory. Therefore, if a hard drive has a large cache, system load can be reduced and data transmission speed will be increased greatly.
5. Average Access Time
Average access time means the time demanded for drive heads to find the target sector where the wanted data to be read/written from the starting position. Thus, it reflects the data read and write speed of a hard drive. Hence, when you select a hard drive, you should absolutely take this into consideration.
6. Interface Type
There are many types of hard drive interface, namely the layouts and connections between chips, controllers and cables in hard drive. This factor will influence and reflect the hard drive performance as well. Different interface types can bring out different performances.
Author Introduction:
Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including mdf repair and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com