HARD DRIVES

Your next major consideration is the hard drive. Your hard drive is the computer’s storage area — the filing cabinet. All files (operating system, applications and data) are stored on the hard drive. Hard drives are measured in “Gigabytes”. The bigger your hard drive is, the more files you can load. The hard drive has a tremendous impact on the computer’s overall performance causing delay while data is pulled off the drive. For example, drive access time is measured in milliseconds and RAM in nanoseconds.

The EIDE Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics) drives allows fast transfers and large capacities. The computer’s system RAM is used for storing the drive’s firmware (software or BIOS). When the drive powers up, it reads the firmware.

The SCSI (Small Computer Serial Interface) drive is the fastest with the largest capacity and the highest transfer rate available on the market. This is not to say that the EIDE drive isn’t capable of the same, it’s just that high-end drives with high capacity and high performance are built for servers. The power of SCSI is that several devices can use its interface simultaneously and the multitasking environment of servers is ideal for SCSI since there is frequent simultaneous access.