Hard Drives
welcome to another installment of my laptop rocks. today, we’re going to talk about my experiences with storage devices since the beginning of my computer era.
1995: 500 mb
the first hard drive that i had was a 500mb maxtor hard disk eleven years ago. that 500mb ceiling was like an extravagance for me back then - housing all the shareware, freeware, applications and utilities that i could ever want - and with room to spare. i could still remember the days when all my data backups required one (yes, ladies and gentlemen, ONE) diskette! the applications of course required several other disks but those were besides the point. it was a time when pkware’s pkzip ruled my world and a bad sector on disk 3 of 5 ruined my world.
it was a time of learning. hard disks back then were prone to bad sectors. as such, i got immersed into the wonderful world of hard disk partitioning, reformatting and system recovery. after a few years of experimentation and bi-weekly reformats though, too many bad sectors rendered the disk impractical close to useless.
1998: 4 gb
when i got into high school, i replaced my hard disk with a 4gb one. now this was the beginneing of the mp3 era (well, at least for me). i could still remember [insert name of person here to avoid legal crap] hex-editing an mp3 ripper to extend the program’s usefulness beyond the 30-day trial. hehe.
2000: 14gb
thanks ealden for providing the missing link in my story (pointing out that win xp came out in 2001). executing graceful recovery now…
for a year or two with my 14gb hd, i was thinking, what am i going to do with all that space? all that unused space for what? even my mp3s back then topped up at only 2gigs! what to do… what to do… then win xp came into my life. and as much as i wanted to believe that i could live forever with my win95 + ie5 setup, i just couldn’t resist winxp. so, at this part of my hard disk life, i went about experimenting with a multi-os setup. i’d have fun playing with my 14gb repartitioning it to have as many as 4 operating systems on separate partitions at a time, shuffling between 95, ME, XP and NT.
2002: 40gb
i can’t remember what happened but i think the hard drive died. therefore, a 40gb ibm drive came into the picture. this drive deserves praise because it still works mighty fine till now. it’s done well, serving as my main os hard disk without a bad cluster *knocks on wood* to date. it’s handled countless nights of school papers and projects with long days of java and php programming.
2005: 160gb
this was the year that i stopped spelling download with the letters H,T,T,P or F,T,P and I,R,C. 2005 will be remembered as the year that i learned how to spell download with only two letters, B and T - thanks to bram and ashwin. it will also be the time when i learned that leaving your pc up and running for days isn’t really going to do you any harm except when your parents find out about your electricity bill. hehe
2006: Now
of the above mentioned disks, only the 40 and 160 gb disks remain alive. and even with a 200gb real estate, i always find myself running out of disk space because of PLDT’s myDSL.
as such, i have rounded up several gadgets to help me get by. listed below are my storage devices, their capacities and pet names for them.
30 gb ipod video - erg raider
60 gb ipod photo - ihsan shade
200gb external hard drive - superman
160gb internal desktop hd - batman
40 gb internal desktop hd - robin
…
which brings us to the topic of the day.
my v2000t packs a fujitsu mvh2080bh or an 80gb 5400rpm sata hard drive with an 8mb cache. let’s disect this gibberish.
5400 revolutions per minute. while that’s not as fast as the 7200 rpm mobile hard drives that’s gaining popularity in the market right now, it is a lot better than the 4200 rpm models and more cost-effective than both. rpms play an important role in system performance by allowing data to be read and written to the platters faster. in general, the more rpms, the better!
sata is short for serial-advanced technology attachment. it is an improvement over its predecessor of eide in that it allows faster data transfer. allowing transfer of 1.5gb/s, i’m very sure all my productivity software will have access to my hard disk on the fly.
what’s gotten me drooling though is sata 2. an upgrade to the serial-advanced technology attachment, sata2 hard-drives are capable of delivering 3Gb/s of data transfer rate if the hard drive is capable and the system is configured to do so. this simply means that reading and writing should be faster - an improvement geared towards heavy gamers (for shorter waits on load screens), graphic artists (update your 20gb photoshop document in a jiffy), scientists (for those calculators that require large amounts of interaction with the hard disk) and many more. and among those two, i can assure you, i am not a graphic artist nor a scientist.
8mb cache. yeah, you’ve got to love these things. this cache provides a buffer between your system and the hard disk. recently used data are kept there in the hopes of being accessed again. as i mentioned in my previous article, caches are very fast memory holders. in this case, the access time for the cache is considerably lower (it is faster to retrieve data from there) than the hard disk itself. as opposed to the traditional 2 and 4 mb caches, this 8mb cache is a blessing for me since i work with a lot of small files whenver i design web pages.
from the fujitsu website, they’re expecting this hard drive to last for around five years. not bad for a laptop. whether it reaches that amount of usefulness or not, only one way to find out!
with all those in mind, i’d like to say that i’m very pleased with my 80gb baby. it’s a four-fold increase from my previous 20gb laptop. while a part of my head might say that 80gb is too much for all the work that i do, i’d like to remind myself that i like keeping several versions of my work on my hard drive. while this eats up hard drive real estate fast, the stress saved by having restore points is priceless. especially with unintentionally deleted data.
it’s dinner time. and until then, see you in the next episode of my laptop rocks.
