Western Digital – Introduction
After making its debut in 1970, Western Digital secured its place among the leading hardware manufacturers in the world. Western Digital is known for creating solutions that allow you to create and secure your digital identity across a multitude of storage mediums from internal HDDs or external HDDs to SSDs as per your feasibility. Western Digital gives you immense control and efficiency to store what’s crucial for you most in a single trusted storage unit.
Choosing between SSD or HDD
Solid-State Drives abbreviated as SSDs ensure faster transfer rates and durability. Due to the lack of any mechanical phenomenon, they perform better than Hard Disk Drives – HDDs in terms of speed. SSDs incorporate NAND flash memory to store your data but this infrastructure has some limitations. Firstly, you can’t store massive amounts of data in SSDs as you can do in HDDs. Secondly, they are much expensive than HDDs. On the contrary, HDDs provide high storage capacity compared to their SSD counterparts. For instance, as of February 2021, the largest HDD available in the market features 18 TB of storage capacity.
If you are not concerned about enormous storage capacity, you can surely invest in getting SSDs for faster transfer rates and durability. But when it comes to storing overwhelming amounts of data, HDDs are a perfect choice.
Western Digital Desktop Hard Disk Drives
The Western Digital desktop hard drive features an extensive storage capacity ranging from 2TB to 18TB. Western Digital is famous for manufacturing hard drives that are extremely durable and are compatible with a range of devices like desktops PCs, and laptops.
Western Digital expects its state-of-the-art 18TB hard drives to be used to store video recordings filmed by 4K surveillance cameras, which can produce around 28TB of data over a period of 6 months.
Western Digital’s latest hard drive offers 10,000 RPM rotational speed with decent storage density and it well suits the workloads that demand frequent read and write operations.
The technology introduced by Western Digital is reliable and affordable compared to its competitors. Nowadays, Hard drives are linked to a motherboard via the latest SATA (Serial ATA) interface without needing a special software utility to work properly.
Difference between IDE and SATA HHDs
Integrated Drive Electronics abbreviated as IDE is a connectivity interface introduced in the mid-1980s. It was used to couple storages mediums like Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Solid State Drives (SSD) and CD/DVD ROMs with the PC’s motherboard.
IDE is capable of sustaining a data transfer rate of up to 130MB/s. IDE possesses a parallel connector and being an old connectivity standard, it shows slower performance and does not have an option for hot plugging.
On the contrary, Serial Advanced Technology Attachment abbreviated as SATA is a connectivity standard that was 1st shown up in the early 2000s. Just like an IDE, it’s an interface used to connect hard disk drives – HDDs, Solid State Drives – SSDs, and CD/DVD ROMs to the motherboard.
SATA has remarkably faster data transfer rates that range from 150 MB/s (for SATA I) to 300MB/s for (SATA II). Being a serial interface, it sustains quick transfer speeds and features support for hot plugging. SATA interfaces are the latest connectivity mediums that are preferred over their conventional IDE counterparts due to faster transfer speeds.
Difference between Desktop and Laptop Hard drives
In past, the hard disk drive – HDDs in desktop computers used to be 5.25 inches in size. But with the advent of modern technology, this size was reduced to 3.5 inches. Nowadays, a desktop hard drive that comes with 3.5 inches dimensions has several internal platters (the number depends upon size and storage density). Due to the presence of a number of mechanical components and platters, it becomes very bulky and heavy. That’s why desktop HDDs are not portable enough to be used in laptops.
The laptop hard drives are 2.5 inches in size and costume less power. Because of the thin and smaller dimensions of a laptop, the hard disk drives specifically designed for laptops are very lean in size.
The bulky dimensions of desktop HDDs offer some perks. It has a higher storage capacity than a laptop hard drive. The bigger dimensions of 3.5 inches in the desktop HDD have more platters leading to more storage space. Modern desktop hard drives have better and sleek storage density that allows them to store 1TB to 18TB of data.
On the other hand, the laptop HDD with 2.5-inch dimensions has a limited number of platters, which in turn compromise the storage space. Due to the laptop’s compact size, the storage size of the laptop HDD cannot surpass the storage size of the desktop HDD.
Does Rotational Speed matter?
In Desktop hard drives, read/write operations are influenced by a disc’s rotational speed, which is the measure of the number of revolutions made by a disc in a unit of time (in minutes). For now, the most easily available and commonly used hard disk devices offer rotational speeds of 5400 to 7200 RPM (rotations per minute), although there are some high-performing (but a bit noisy) and faster hard drives that can reach up to 10000 RPM.
For a desktop computer, if you want to experience faster as well as quiet read/write operations, 7200RPM is a decent number. However, for laptops, the rotational speed is usually limited to 5400 RPM because of its smaller size of 2.5-inches.
How does a Desktop Hard Drive work?
Hard disk drives incorporate mechanical components consisting of rotating disks and a hovering read/write head. whenever the operating system sends a signal to load or access a file, the hard disk searches the designated disk and tracks (where a certain file or piece of data is residing) and moves the read/write head above it.
Data write operations are performed in the form of electric pulses by a device present in the magnetic head. Upon completion of 1st write operation, the head hovers to another location to repeat the same process again.
Decent Capacity and Value to Money Western Digital HDD modules
To scale up your desktop hard drive with a faster and decent capacity HDD, Western Digital offers a range of products that support the SATA interface such as WD6400AAKS-40H2B0. The said product features 640 GB of storage space. WD6400AAKS-40H2B0 features a 3.5-inch size, SATA connectivity, and rotational speed of 7200 RPM. All these features make this product one of the best hard drives available in the market.
End Words
Western Digital is one of the top tech companies that produce storage devices, both flash and disk. With one of its best-selling products WD6400AAKS-40H2B0 SATA HDD, you can experience a noteworthy boost in your storage performance and secure massive amounts of data without any second thought.