Fast Facts: Hard Disk Drives
Data storage is the lifeblood of your business, but have you ever looked under the hood of the actual devices that do the grueling work of storing your data? At Uncloud Storage®, we have a deep understanding of the data storage devices that drive our business; in other words, we have done the research, so you don’t have to. (part one of three)
Since their invention in the 1950s, Hard Disk Drives have retained their status as the backbone of digital storage. For the majority of recent computer history, if you had something to store, you were storing it on a hard disk drive. Recently, however, this trend is beginning to change, with the introduction of affordable, high-speed, solid-state media.
At its roots, a hard drive is similar to a magnetic tape recorder, where pulses of data are written onto a magnetic surface, but that is where the similarities end. In a hard disk drive, the magnetic surface is deposited onto 3-inch round disks, usually made of glass or aluminum, called platters. These platters are attached to a spindle that spins the platters at rotational speeds close to the red line of a supercar engine. Data is read and written to the platters with a read-write head, flying above the disk about 1,400 times closer than the diameter of a red blood cell. The read-write head is propelled back and forth across the disk by a magnetic coil drive, just like a pair of speakers. This intricate mechanical dance results in a storage device that is able to store and retrieve trillions of bytes of digital data.
On the other hand, because of the mechanically complicated nature of these devices, reliability is an issue as these devices age. In a business setting, we have found that the maximum amount of time to keep a hard disk drive in active service is 5 years. After the 5-year mark, mechanical issues begin to crop up, endangering the data stored on the disk. Because of the myriad of reliability issues that hard disk drives can have, the data stored on these disks must be backed up, either with automated or manual backup strategies. Additionally, the same mechanical complexity that enables massive capacity also is a major data transfer speed bottleneck. To read each chunk of data, the drive must move its internal components to the exact location of your data. Because physical movement is involved, this process results in slow data transfer speeds, by nature.
At Uncloud Storage®, we do not feel that hard disk drives meet our stringent customer experience standards for both reliability or for speed; therefore, we only include upgraded solid state drives for your local vault and only use solid state drives in our private cloud.
