Before you choose a hard drive, you should know what hard drive types, there are in general and to what types of interfaces do they support. In this section, you will find the necessary information about this issue. There are four hard drive types: Hard drives for desktop computers: their size is 3.5 ", with the speed of 5400 and 7200 revolutions per minute, they support the IDE and SATA. Hard drives for servers: they have the same size as the drives for desktop computers, but are higher in speed (their speed is up to 15,000 revolutions per minute). They support parallel SCSI and serial interfaces SATA and SAS. To compare the disk drives for desktop computers with servers, you will see that the second ones are much better. Continuous operation time is about 1,000,000 hours.

To store and transport large amounts of information are designed external hard drives. They are mobile carriers. They allow you to transport information such as video and audio files, or office. External hard drive controller is equipped to connect to a specific port. Controllers support USB 2.0 and FireWire (1394). Hard drives for laptops are in size 2.5 ", their speed is 4200 or 5400 revolutions in a minute. It supports IDE interface and generally possess (or at least should have) a high impact resistance. Let us examine the types of interfaces, hard disks. Should follow the so that the interface supported by the hard drive were available on the motherboard. USB - interface serial data transmission. Its throughput speed is 12 Mbit / s (USB 1.1) and 480 Mbit / sec (USB 2.0). It is a standard interface for connecting hard drives.

IDE - Interface parallel data transmission. Its throughput speed is 133 MB / sec. Most often, this interface have a desktop and laptop computers. Its rival - Interface is SATA. SATA - Interface parallel data transmission. Its capacity is much higher - up to 300 MB / sec. It is more resistant to interference and greatly exceeds the interface IDE. SCSI is a parallel interface communication. Primarily used in servers. It has high performance and reliability. SAS - (Serial Attached SCSI) - interface serial data transmission. This is a more advanced modification of the SCSI interface with a higher data rate. FireWire - serial interface data rates up to 400 Mbit / sec and high bandwidth. Just do not have analogues when dealing with video data.