Last week I talked about why I chose my 600W Bronze power supply instead of Kalen’s 500W power supply, and this week I will be talking about hard drives.
A hard drive is a computer part that stores information. For example, my hard drive can store 1TB of information. A TB or terabyte is a number to measure how many bytes can be stored. The number of bytes that can be store is 1000,000,000,000. Think about it like this, one byte is one letter, 1,000 bytes or kilobytes is a word, 1,000,000 bytes or megabytes is a paragraph, 1,000,000,000 bytes or gigabyte is a book, and 1,000,000,000,000 or terabyte is a whole shelf of books. Now think about how many letters there are, that is how many bytes can be stored on my hard drive.
I’ve talked about the amazing storage of the hard drive but there are also downsides. One of the downsides of having just a hard drive is it takes a while for the computer to retrieve the information. One way many people fix this problem is to also get an SSD, also known as a Solid State Drive (I will talk about SSD in another blog).
The hard drive I got, is a mechanical Western Digital 1 TB 3.5-Inch 7200 RPM SATA III, while Kalen is inheriting daddy’s old 500GB hard drive. I don’t know the specs of Kalen’s hard drive, but I can tell you that my hard drive has double the storage. After I watched a few videos on YouTube, I discovered a few new things about my hard drive. For example, my hard drive might be a mechanical and SSD hybrid drive. I also learned the higher RPM the faster your computer will run (but this won’t really matter if you get an SSD), and depending on how much cache you have the more information you can have on standby making your computer run faster.
Overall I’m pretty happy with my buy because it was on sale. With 7200 RPM I won’t need an SSD right away and 64MB of cache seems alright. Hopefully, in the future I can get an SSD as well.