all in the title. i started wondering this when i started to shop for hard drives and saw a million different 1tb hdds with varying prices. so obviously they must all be different, why? why pay more, what is inside these things?
Well its like anything prices vary from different products however there are somethings that set different storage devices apart.
-HDD are slower and less reliable due to moving parts however the price per GB is alot lower
-SSD are alot faster and more reliable due to no moving parts (hense Solid State Drive) however the price per GB is alot higher
Then there's different interfaces:
-Sata 2 which delivers 3GB/s
-Sata 3 which delivers 6GB/s
This generally does not make too much of a difference with HDD however with SSD it can make quite a difference.
i want really looking for the difference between a ssd and an hdd i was just wondering about things like the cache and whats up with the constellation seagate drives etc.
Hard drives have magnetic discs in them thats where the data is stored.An actuator selects and spins a disc whenever you are writing/reading
The speed of the hard drive is the rotation speed of theese discs.
The cache is where data is temporarily stored before sending a read or doing a write.
The price of the drive depends on those two plus latency and build grade.
Enterprise level hard drives (for example seagate constellation) are designed to run 24/7 so they are more expensive.
Low latency black drives (wd black,seagate barracuda) are more expensive than higher latency green/blue drives(wd or samsung).
If you are looking for storage any 7200 rpm drive will do but if you are running programs from it,it is better to use a 64mb cache black drive.
The actuator in hdd's becomes the limiting factor after 7200 rpm so the 10k or 15k drives are marketing stuff.Stay away from those.
are wd blue drives better than seagate barracuda drives?
Barracuda is a bit faster and just as quiet.The wd black is a bit faster than the barracuda but is a bit noisier.
All 3 are good drives.