1TB Hard Drive
A 1TB hard drive is a the part in a computer that basically does nothing else than keeping hold of your data and handing it back to you should you ever need them again. A TB means a terabyte which is a unit of data measurement, you shouldn’t worry much about it as I’m going to get to it soon.
Regular hard drives are metal disks coated with magnetically active substance in a metal casing. Above these disks hovers a head, which is nothing more than a device to tell what magnetic state is the spot (block) is in that passes under it. The head can also change that state.
After the drive has picked up enough data to transfer as a batch it passes it along to the motherboard where the processor computes it, therefore the operating system can work with the data coming. It can send and request data without having the first clue about what’s going on inside the hard drive disk.
A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes or 1,000,000 megabytes. Quite shocking to think about, so here it is put into normal world measurements: A terabytes is what you can hold your 8 gigabyte ipod’s full content… 125 times. 220 dvd discs would cover the same about of data and you can easily put 285 000 high quality mp3 tracks on it.
There are two kinds of connectors we can talk about, the SATA and the PATA. These are not some kind of curse words for geeks, SATA means Serial AT Attachment and PATA is it’s parallel counterpart. Serial data transfer in this case is superior to the old parallel solution because exchange of data is much more easily synchronized over serial connection and costs of manufacturing are also lower. There is not much of a price to cut on a cable that is 20 inches long, but think about it.
Instead of 80 wires you get 7 and it’s not just one cable, there are hundreds of millions of personal computers out there still using PATA, how many tons of copper could we get back by just recycling those cables and put SATA instead.
When buying a 1tb hard drive you should always try to educate yourself about the best deals and reading articles, forum posts and reviews is one of the best ways doing it.