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Tuesday, 14 June 2011

How Do I Know if I Need a New Hard Drive - Traditional vs SSD

Posted on 13:02 by Unknown
Easy answer; If it has failed or is failing. An easy way to tell if it is failing; listen to the hard drive itself for a clicking or grinding sound, couple that with degrading performance and it is likely that your hard drive is on its way to a better place. If you notice these symptoms try to do a backup as quickly as possible, or call your local Northern Computer technician to have us save the data before it is too late.
If you have decided to upgrade or replace your hard drive then you have a few things to consider: Interface, style, storage size, data transfer rate, form factor etc etc.

In years gone by the standard interface for hard drives and other devices was IDE, more recently a shift has been made to SATA. Without overloading you with computer jargon; IDE is slower/bigger (bigger being a problem for heat dissipation within the computer case,) while SATA is fast and getting faster and has a very small footprint within the computer. To sum up, older PC’s (5+ years old) will very likely run on a IDE interface, while anything newer than that will give you the option of both IDE and SATA.

In recent years there has been a movement from the standard spinning plate hard drive (very likely what is in your PC) to what is called SSD or Solid State Drive. A solid state drive is exactly what it sounds like, solid with no moving parts. The benefits to a SSD drive are significant; lower failure rate, smaller form factor, higher transfer speeds of data, less consumption of power. The major downfall at this point is the cost and storage size. With a typical spinning platter hard drive costing less than 10 cents for GB and the typical SSD running closer to 1 dollar per GB, one can argue that the cost outweighs the benefits. As with anything in technology prices continue to decrease, and soon enough SSD will be the standard is personal computers.

- Ryan R, Network Support Technician

Northern Computer - Your Trusted Partner
#1 - 495 Banks Road Kelowna, BC V1X 6A2
Phone: 250.762.7753 Fax: 250.861.1861 Toll-Free: 1.877.257.2896
Email: sales@northerncomputer.ca or service@northerncomputer.ca
Web: http://www.northerncomputer.ca
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