Mechanical drives aren’t the best choice for running operating systems and applications anymore, but these devices have plenty of advantages in their own right, and are still improving with new technological breakthroughs.
Fondly referred to as “spinning rust” among some computer nerds, mechanical hard drives seem almost quaint compared to hyper-fast SSDs. Yet, the idea that mechanical hard drives are ready for the trash pile may be more than a little premature.
Mechanical Drives Are Still Getting Faster
Most of you reading this probably have experienced mid-range hard drives that spin between 5400 and 7200 RPM, with transfer speeds between 100-120 Megabytes per second. However, that’s not nearly as fast as hard drives can go.
Higher-end drives easily exceed 200 MB/s when it comes to sequential read and write speeds. 10,000 RPM mechanical hard drives often have sustained transfer rates around the 250 MB/s mark. While this is still much slower than an SSD, it’s still fast enough for many applications and uses.
Best of all, it doesn’t seem engineers and scientists have reached the limit of HDD technology either. Seagate’s Read Full Article Source
