The Hard Drive as Eye Candy

The New York Times takes a look at the hard drive market.

Strong demand for external hard drives was one of the highlights in consumer electronics last year. Americans spent $600 million on external hard drives in 2006, an increase of 53 percent over 2005, according to NPD, a market research firm. Put another way, consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year, more than 11 times as much as they did in 2003.

Understanding Hard Drive Performance

Tom’s Hardware takes a look at hard drive performance, focusing mainly on 7200 RPM drives.

This article will give you an overview of all parameters that are relevant to hard drive performance. These are the drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory.