what a hard drive is and what it does what's with all the hype about the new SSDs in we'll explain the various different types of hard drives you can use for your computer so you're going about your day to day life and realize that you've masked a ton of cat videos what's the best way for you to store this massive information efficiently here's an example of the old type of hard drives we call them pedate stands for parallel data you may see these types of drives on older computers on the bottom, you'll notice multiple places to plugin here are the cables that connect to it we call this one the peda data cable or ribbon cable for the power it uses a standard Molex adapter and that plugs in right here jumping forward in time a little bit we see the hard drive that's commonly used today and we call it the SATA drive or serial ata drive the inputs for this drive are much smaller and don't have pins circled in red is a spot for power here the data cables this one we call the SATA power cable next we have the position where the data cable plugs in and you have this SATA data cable which is significantly smaller than the last ribbon cable okay so why are you wasting my time telling me all this why is this so important well first you have to understand what the difference between EDA and SATA is or parallel and serial data transfer think of parallel ata or pedals a bunch of messengers lined up in a row they're all coming together to tell the king an entire message.
But in order for them to give him that message they'll have to arrive at the same time if one gets there first he has to wait for the others to catch up in order for the king to receive the entire message conversely SATA is a method in which all of the data comes in a straight line the first character gets to the king first followed by the second then the third and so on and so on with as many characters as needed no need to wait around for slowpokes to catch up this results in Paytas being a max of 16 megabytes per second dwarf by today's SATA speeds which can be a maximum of 600 megabytes per second of course just because I say that 600megabytes max that's the maximum that the method can transfer normal refurbished hard disk that we use today that are SATAtypically can only max out at 175megabytes and the one that's in your computer right now probably maxes out at80 megabytes per second but we have invented a way to get more use out of that 600-megabyte maximum speed enter solid-state drives as you might notice are much thinner because they don't have a physical spinning disk inside of them cruises connectors which fortunately is the exact same as the SATA hard drives making it easy to switch between the two thanks to these new SSDs.
You can go from the 80 megabytes that
you're used to right now to a whopping 220 megabytes per second but before you go
out and buy yourself an SSD hoping to game in high-speed keep in mind these SSDs are phenomenally more expensive than their spinning disk counterparts which is why you might want to store your terabytes worth of cat videos on the old SATA drives and your video games and operating system on the new SSD so far we've only
covered desktop computer hard drives there's still laptop buy used hard disk which can
be those with a spinning disk or solid-state drives or they can be another type
which is called M SATA SSDswhich are much smaller than their smartphones that
have an internal memory or a microSD card that you can add when you have cameras
and game consoles and every other type of device that needs any type of data
storage big or small I hope that gives you a little bit better understanding of
the different types of hard drives.
