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Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

2023-10-29

Dear friends, Double 11 is too busy to make eye contact. For those looking to buy hard drives, are you so blinded that you don't know which one to buy? Today I will share with you different types of mechanical, solid state and mobile hard drives. I hope to get advice and help for everyone with purchase.

Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

Before publishing, let's popularize current classification of hard drives. Please ignore your boss. Xiaobai read it carefully. After reading, I think it will be useful for you to choose a hard drive.

Classification of different types of hard drives by type Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

Hard drives are divided into solid state drives (SSDs) and mechanical hard drives (HDDs). Solid state drives use flash memory particles to store data, while hard drives use magnetic disks. The HHD solid-state mechanical hybrid hard drive is not mentioned here, and it is practically excluded.

By size (many refers to a mechanical hard drive) Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

⒊.5-inch desktop hard drive; main one, widely used in various desktop computers and NAS.

⒉.5 inch laptop hard drive; widely used in legacy laptops, desktop all-in-ones and mobile hard drives.

⒈8" (Hybrid HDD), virtually impossible;

1.3", 1.0", and 0.85" micro-hard drives are hardly used nowadays.

By interface (key content should be tested) Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

SATA Mechanical/SSD

Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

SATA interface

A hard drive using a SATA port is also called a serial hard drive, which is currently primary interface. In 2001, Serial ATA committee, made up of several major manufacturers such as Intel, APT, Dell, IBM, Seagate, and Maxtor, officially set SATA (data) specification to be verified, and if an error is found, it will be corrected automatically. , greatly improving reliability of data transfer, which is one of reasons why it is still primary hard disk interface.

SATA3.0 is currently most commonly used interface for conventional 2.5" and 3.5" solid state and mechanical hard drives on market. The theoretical bandwidth is 6Gbps, and read and write speeds are about 500MB/s. s, which can meet daily needs of most users.

MSATA SSD

Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

msata interface

msata is a new interface specification developed by SATA Association. Its main purpose is to adapt to miniaturization of hard drives. mSATA provides same speed and reliability as SATA interface standard. Due to small size of mSATA SSD in 2014, it has been used in more and more laptops, such as Lenovo E220s, E420s, E430, Y460, Y560, K26, Dell M4500 series, M6400 series and other products. The .2 interface is reliable With advent of hard drives and their huge benefits, msata SSDs have all but disappeared and their current market is only used to upgrade legacy laptops.

M.2 SSD

Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

Common M.2 interface SSD interface

The M.2 interface, which we have often mentioned before, is a new interface specification introduced by Intel to replace MSATA. At present, price is gradually decreasing, and there is a trend to replace SATA SSDs. Compared with MSATA, M.2 mainly has two advantages. The first is speed advantage. The read speed of M.2 interface can reach 600MB/s, and write speed can reach 550MB/s. Secondly, size advantage. Although MSATA SSDs are quite small, MSATA still has no advantage over M.2 SSDs: M.2 can provide higher storage capacity at same size.

Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

NVMe M.2 interface

Currently, M.2 interface supports two channel buses, one is a SATA bus and other is a PCI-E bus (most of current market is PCI-E 3.0*4, which supports NVMe protocol). Due to theoretical bandwidth limitation (6Gbps), maximum SATA link rate can only reach 600MB/s, but PCI-E link bandwidth can reach 10Gbps, and PCI-E 3.0* 4 bandwidth can reach 32Gb/s. 1000MB/s is normal, and maximum can reach 2000MB/s, so it seems that they are all M.2 interfaces, but channels are different, and speed naturally varies greatly. Also due to difference in interfaces and speeds , NVMe protocol. The price of an M.2 SSD is also relatively high.

PCIe expansion SSD

Double Eleven Hard Drive Buying Guide Hard Drive Basics

PCIe

On SATA hard disk, when we read data, data will first be read from hard disk to memory, then data will be transferred to CPU for calculation, then written to memory, and then saved to hard disk, while solid state hard disk drive with PCI-E interface. The data is directly connected to CPU via bus, and efficiency and transmission speed are doubled. The maximum speed reaches 32Gbps. It is widest SSD on market and price is relatively expensive.