The most important storage device in your PC is the hard drive. The average hard drive sold today can store as much information as tens of thousands of floppy disks, and it can find and read that information faster than any other storage device, including CDs and DVDs. The majority of the storage space on most people's hard drive is used for programs such as the operating system, word processing and database software, and games. No author, living or dead, could ever fill up a modern hard drive by writing books, but a couple hours of high-quality video would do the job. Although you can always make room on a nearly full hard drive by destroying (deleting) old programs of information, most people prefer to let the clutter build up like old boxes in the attic, simply adding a new hard drive when things get too crowded.
Although the storage provided by the hard drive is certainly permanent in comparison to RAM, it's nowhere near bulletproof. The mean time between failure (MTBF) ratings provided by hard drive manufactures are highly optimistic, and always exceed the useful life of the drive by at least a decade. Anecdotally, I would estimate that one in ten hard drives suffers complete failure within a couple years of being purchased, with an even higher rate in notebook computers. These failures can result from all sorts of environmental issues such as excessive heat, power spikes, or the PC getting thumped at just the wrong moment.
For this reason, anybody who uses a PC for more than games and Internet surfing should get in the habit of making copies of important information, a process known as "creating a backup”. Creating a backup can be as simple as copying your checkbook register or word processing documents to a floppy disk once a week, but never use the floppy disks to exclusively store documents in place of the hard drive because they are far less reliable, not to mention much slower.
Although the storage provided by the hard drive is certainly permanent in comparison to RAM, it's nowhere near bulletproof. The mean time between failure (MTBF) ratings provided by hard drive manufactures are highly optimistic, and always exceed the useful life of the drive by at least a decade. Anecdotally, I would estimate that one in ten hard drives suffers complete failure within a couple years of being purchased, with an even higher rate in notebook computers. These failures can result from all sorts of environmental issues such as excessive heat, power spikes, or the PC getting thumped at just the wrong moment.
For this reason, anybody who uses a PC for more than games and Internet surfing should get in the habit of making copies of important information, a process known as "creating a backup”. Creating a backup can be as simple as copying your checkbook register or word processing documents to a floppy disk once a week, but never use the floppy disks to exclusively store documents in place of the hard drive because they are far less reliable, not to mention much slower.
Hardisk Drive
In critical business applications, a special technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) provides a means to duplicate data across several hard drives to increase performance and protect against the failure of any individual drive. RAID solutions usually provide automatic fail over, so you won't experience any down time if a single drive fails in the middle of the business day. We will give an example of a simple RAID sub-system in our Pentium 4 build.
RAID provides no protection against fire, theft, data management errors, or computer viruses. Tape backups are the dominant devices for backing up large amounts of data, although DVD recorders and new high-capacity cartridge drives from Iomega might pick up some of the load. CD recorders, also know as burners, provide an excellent option for data backup if you organize your files on the hard drive so you know what to copy to the CD.
In critical business applications, a special technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) provides a means to duplicate data across several hard drives to increase performance and protect against the failure of any individual drive. RAID solutions usually provide automatic fail over, so you won't experience any down time if a single drive fails in the middle of the business day. We will give an example of a simple RAID sub-system in our Pentium 4 build.
RAID provides no protection against fire, theft, data management errors, or computer viruses. Tape backups are the dominant devices for backing up large amounts of data, although DVD recorders and new high-capacity cartridge drives from Iomega might pick up some of the load. CD recorders, also know as burners, provide an excellent option for data backup if you organize your files on the hard drive so you know what to copy to the CD.
1 comments:
Hard drive is a useful storage device in a computer system because we save all the useful and informative information in it and even the we installed the operating system which i used are also installed in it. Thanks for the updated information.
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