HARD DRIVE

Your Hard Disk or sometimes called a Hard Drive, is the main storage space inside your PC. It is a permanent storage component unlike the RAM (system memory). It is possible for your computer to function without a hard disk, however it would be basically useless to you as you would not be able to use an Operating system or have any programs to use. Hard disks use a circular hard platters to store data on. They are in pristine condition with a mirror like finish to them. These platters are locked away inside a steel casing as unclean air can easily ruin a hard disk. This is why you should never remove the casing from the hard disk, it is very unlikely you will be able to put it back together as a working component.

Above you can see a labelled diagram of a hard disk. The model is a SCSI (Small Computer Scientific Interface) You can see the hard platters on top of each other with a set of arms which hold the read/write head. The speed of the arm is truly amazing as well as the accuracy of the head which can read and write to perfection on a platter which is rotating around 7200Rpm. The hard disk looks a very simple idea and probably is, however a lot goes on before the simple writing to the disk its self. We will explain a little more later in the article.

How does the hard disk store data?

On each of the platters there is a thin layer of magnetic film. Data storage on hard disks is very similar to that of a cassette tape. Data is stored in many 1's and 0's. These binary digits are arranged in different ways to represent different characters. When these are read back by the head the data is retrieved and processed.

File Systems
A file system is the way in which your computer stores data on the hard disk. The most common file systems are FAT16 for older computers, FAT32 and NTFS. FAT stands for File Allocation Table. NTFS stands for NT File System. Both have advantages and disadvantages. FAT16 was a very limited file system in the way that it would store data very in-efficiently, every file would take up a minimum of 32Kb in space as this was the minimum cluster size in a FAT16 system. Also it was only capable of using hard disks upto 2Gb in size. FAT32 solved this problem by reducing the cluster size to 4kb which saved a lot of wasted space and also allowed disk sizes up to 2 Terra bytes. NTFS is believed to be a far greater file systems than any of the FAT's. The cluster sizes can be altered to anything as low as 512bytes which means almost no wasted space on the hard disk. The maximum disk size is a unbelievable 18.5 x 10 bytes, which is very big !!!. NTFS also has added security for file loss.

Measuring the Speed of a Hard Disk

There are various ways of measuring the speed of the hard disk. The main ones are the maximum data transfer rate, the spindle rotation speed and the seek time. Maximum Transfer Rate - This is the highest amount of data that can be transferred per second. Common forms of hard disks come with an ATA format. the speed rating of an ATA100 disk would be 100Mb/s. Likewise a ATA66 disk would be able to transfer a maximum of 66Mb/s. Spindle Rotation Speed - The rotation speed of the disk really is the basis of the other two factors of hard disk speed. The faster the rotation speed, the more data can be written per second and the quicker it is to find the correct data on the platter. Seek Time - The seek time of a hard disk is the average time it takes for the disk to find the data you need on the platters. A fast spinning, highly accurate and responsive disk will have a shorter seek time and will perform much better, especially when the data is scattered around the disk.

Disk Fragmentation
All versions of Windows come with a disk defragmenter. But what exactly is fragmentation? As you use your computer daily files get written and deleted constantly from the disk, either by yourself or by the operating system creating and removing temporary files. This process leave the disk in no sort of order and when new file are written to the disk they start to get written in the gaps on the disk. The fact that single files are written in different parts of the disk means that the disk has to go round the disk reading different parts instead of just streaming the data straight off the disk. This is called Fragmentation. The defrag program within windows sorts out the files into order again to make the disk perform faster.

Connection Types
There are currently 3 connections for a hard disk. IDE (or ATA) SCSI and Serial ATA. The most common is the IDE interface. This provides an 80 pin connection to most standard motherboards and you can't normally go wrong buying an IDE drive for your machine. SCSI connections often require extra hardware unless its built into your motherboard. SCSI hard disks are often faster but more expensive than there IDE counterparts. The final type is the newest type. Serial ATA does away with parallel data transfer which has its problem of large wires and electrical interference. The Serial ATA standard is more reliable and uses smaller un-obtrusive wires. Smaller wires also means better air flow for your case.

GRAPHIC CARD
The graphics card is responsible for delivering the image you see on your PC monitor. Its GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) processes the machine code and changes it into a signal to the monitor. There are many factors to a graphics card. Choosing one can be a tricky business these days as there is so much technology that is different in each new graphics card release. More of these later in the article

Graphics Acceleration
When PC first came and for some time after, the graphics cards purpose was only to display the image on the screen. The amount of memory you got on a graphics card was very small and was not needed to a great extent. Today's graphics cards do more than just display an image, they help the processor with the job of processing when it comes to the graphics. The graphics card would in effect accelerate the process of displaying the image on screen. This was needed when the 3D gaming world took the centre stage. The speed required to process the images on screen at 60 frames per second and process the code for the game itself was simply too much for a CPU to handle on its own and so the games would simply crawl along at a very slow pace. The graphics card would use some of its own built in instruction logic to added things such as textures lighting effects, fog effect and bump mapping to give a far more detailed picture. Also the speeds of graphics cards have improved a great deal in order to let these effects be used without the problem of the frame rate dropping.

AGP or PCI Express

Two types of Graphics card available today are the AGP and PCI-e versions. The AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) is the older of the two technologies but still quite popular as many people still have these slots incorporated into there motherboards. The PCI-Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect) version has been around for a couple of years now and new graphics cards and motherboards alike are using this technology. PCI express offers a greater scope for data transfer to and from the graphics card and main memory.

How do you measure the speed of a graphics card?

Measuring the speed of the graphics card is a lot more difficult than with the CPU or RAM or even the hard disk. There are many factors which affect how quickly the graphics card can do its job. Many of these only come into play when the graphics card is undertaking certain tasks. Core clock speed - Much the same as the way you measure the speed of a CPU. The core speed of the Graphics card is measured in MHz and represents the amount of clock cycles the graphics process can do per second. This is a good but not definitive way of telling how fast the graphics card is.

Memory clock speed - Exactly the same of as the core clock speed, except of course that it is for the memory of the graphics card and not the core. This is just as important as the core speed as the memory contains textures that need to be applied to the pixels. Pixel Pipelines - The amount of pixel pipelines a graphics card has can have a great impact on the speed of the image rendering. This is all about pixel pushing power. A card with 8 pipelines can process twice as many pixels as a card of the same core speed and 4 pipelines. Textures per pipeline - This only come into effect when multiple textures are needed on the one pixel. Simply put if a multiple texture is needed, then a graphics card with more textures per pipeline will be quicker. On single textured pixels the amount of texture per pipeline will have no effect. There are more smaller things such as T&L technology anti-aliasing and various other quality increasing and speed increasing technology that different cards have. I wont go into them all here as there are a great many between all the cards on the market.

Memory Bandwidth
The memory bandwidth is the rate of data transferred from the GPU to the graphics memory. This has been one of the biggest bottle necks in graphics cards for years. Newer cards are overcoming this problem with expensive memory solutions at high speeds. The higher the memory bandwidth the better the graphics card will be able to retrieve data and textures from the graphics memory. As this is a real bottle neck this is a really important feature of the graphics card