Hard drives are the most mechanically-driven data-devices in a computer system. Due to this, hard drives are quite inefficient and are the usually culprits for keeping your system from its true potential. Obviously, mechanical devices are significantly slower than their electronic counterparts, and thus, one can only wait for the first fully electronic hard drive.

Meanwhile, the electromechanical hard drive seems to be the living fossil of computer technology. While numerous improvements have been made to hard drives throughout the years since the first hard drive was introduced in 1956 by IBM, hard drives have virtually remained the same. It had a capacity of around five megabytes stored on fifty 24" disks. Nowadays we are seeing up to 400GB (gigabyte: approximately 1000 megabytes) of storage on merely five 3 ½" platters, each holding 80GB.

As hard drive capacities increase, data randomization impacts access time (the time it takes for the read/write heads to seek the specific track on a specific platter and for the platter to rotate so that the requested data is found) more noticeably. Currently, you have several seconds of both seek and rotational latencies. This can seriously steal away from your system’s potential performance peek, even though a few milliseconds don’t seem like much. Applications queue many sets of data and if those bits of infomration are on different parts of the hard drive, it may take many seconds for the hard drive to find all the necessary information to run the application.

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