Hard Drives and Solid State Drives

It is a Western Digital Black Caviar 1.5 TB hard drive. It works best when hooked up to SATA 3. It is one of the best on the Market. Normally that is covered up and you don't see it. $189.99

 It is a Corsair ForceGT 120 GB Solid State Drive. Again it works best when hooked up to SATA 3. This is the mid-range At $249.99, it has to be FAST!

Something to remember. I used to have a hard drive that stood 3" high, and 5.25" w and about 6" long. It was state of the art and it had 10 megs and I thought it was a steal at over $300. 

The Hard drive pictured above is 1" high, 3.5" wide and 4 maybe 5" long. It has 1.5 Tera bytes. The Solid State Drive is 2.5 " wide and about 3.5 inches long with height of 3/8" of an inch. 

Windows 7 has an ability to pair up a SSD drive with a hard drive to speed things up. I am going to have one of each. I will pair them up so that Windows Uses the SSD for most of the programs I use and puts the rarer programs on the hard drive. 

Everyone by now knows about defragmentors and how necessary it is to defrag your HD every so often. It isn't necessary for the SSD's. However it is necessary to run a program called garbage collection. Now, for us, we normally wouldn't think of this. It has to do with how a Hard Drive works as opposed to an Solid State Drive.

It works like this, the operating system, when erasing a program or data, erases the first bit of data and thus allows the hard drive to write over the rest when you put another program in. Well with solid state drives, it does the same thing. The first bit of data and the program disappears. Voila. The rest still are there and won't be written over until you run a program to get rid of the rest of the garbage.  If this isn't performed on a regular basis, the drive will start to slow down. Small price to pay for super speeds.



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