To determine the fastest hard drive, you need to understand the parameters of the hard drive:

• capacity;
• interface;
• form factor;
• random access time;
• output and input operations;
• rotation speed, etc.

All computer hard drives have a specific connection interface. Most often, modern devices operate using SATA. Therefore, there should not be any difficulties in choosing.

Next you need to select the capacity of the HDD. Depending on the needs, models from 200 GB are available to the user. The 10 TB model is considered the most capacious. The form factor for a PC is 3.5 inches, and for a laptop - 2.5 inches.

The following settings directly affect hard drive activity. The fastest hard drive can be determined by the indicator It is determined by the number of revolutions per minute.

For home systems, it is enough to choose models that have an indicator of 5400 and 7200 rpm. The fastest computer hard drives operate at 10 and 15 thousand rpm. But these options are often used in high-performance systems and server stations.

Random access time also affects device performance. The range of this characteristic is from 2.5 to 16 ms. For comparison, almost all SSDs operate at 1 ms or less.

New: characteristics

Of course, you can try to find out which hard drive is the fastest by reviewing the parameters of each on the Internet. But in the spring of 2018, the record holder in this area was officially presented. At the exhibition, Seagate presented the fastest hard drive.

The multi-actuator drive has become a feature of the new product. Mach.2 provided a different positioning of the magnetic heads. 480 MB/s is a new record for data read and write speed. For example, all modern PC models that have 7200 rpm operate with a throughput of 235 MB/s.

Thanks to the new technologies that the hard drive received, it turned out to be 60% more productive than models operating at 15,000 rpm.

Peculiarities

What is the secret of the new railway? High productivity was achieved due to the fact that the head blocks are located on separate rods. Therefore, commands can be sent to specific sectors. From here it became possible to run simultaneously reading and writing data.

With high performance, the fastest hard drive can be installed in productive data processing systems.

New technologies

Manufacturers did not stop there and introduced new HAMR technology. This is a thermomagnetic recording that has special operating parameters. First you need to install a laser in the head. This is necessary in order to spot heat the disk plate to 400 degrees. Thus, it will be possible to record up to 2 TB of data per square inch.

Other models

But until Seagate has released its model on the market, we will have to look for an alternative to it. Here it is important to look closely at the device parameters. If you set out to find a fast hard drive for your home PC, you can choose among models with 10,000 rpm performance.

You will also need to select the highest throughput. On average, this figure is 100-150 MB/s. You can find models in which this figure exceeds 200 MB/s.

For example, Western Digital WD4000FYYZ, which has 4 TB, is considered a good model. The model operates at 7200 rpm and a throughput of 171 MB/s. This version will cost 29 thousand rubles.

For laptops

The fastest hard drive for a laptop should be found among gaming models. For example, a good hard drive Seagate Laptop SSHD. It’s worth noting right away that this is a hybrid of SSD and HDD, and therefore, a priori, this HDD is fast and productive.

Adaptive Memory is a technology that affects the speed of the device. It also provides high reliability. Because it uses flash and disk technologies, the Seagate Laptop SSHD has a high level of data protection from damage.

Since it is a hybrid, it is most often installed in gaming laptops. Unlike a regular hard drive, this one is 5 times faster. But among the disadvantages of this model are considered to be noise and energy consumption.

external HDs

Finding the fastest external hard drive is quite a difficult task. Here you need to not only search for a good option in online stores, but also study reviews on forums.

The SanDisk Extreme 900 turned out to be a good model. The peculiarity of this device is that not a large hard drive was placed inside, but two thin solid-state drives. The SSD here works using RAID 0.

Many users speak positively about this model, but criticize its large size. This drive will be difficult to put in your pocket. Yes, and you will need a rather large handbag for it. Nevertheless, such dimensions are justified by high speed and the use of technology.

The 2 TB model writes and reads data at a speed of 600-800 MB/s. For more comfortable operation, the device uses a USB 3.1 interface. Of course, such indicators will surprise anyone who wants to purchase the fastest external hard drive. But there is one catch - the cost. For speed and reliability you will have to pay $800.

Alternative

To avoid spending $800 on the previous model, you can take a closer look at the T5 SSD. This is a product from Samsung that costs only $350. Its advantage is the relatively high speed and compactness of the device.

The model is available in variations from 500 GB to 2 TB. The drive has a USB 3.1 interface. Of course, this model is not as fast as the previous one, but even it can transfer 20 GB in 110 seconds.

If this model also seems expensive to you, you can take a closer look at the Seagate Backup Plus Portable. Depending on the capacity, it can cost from 50 to 160 dollars. The model works with the USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) interface. You can purchase a 1, 2 and 5 TB drive.

There is also an option that works with two built-in SSDs in a RAID array. This drive has 4 TB of free space. The advantage of this model is the speed of transferring large files, but the hard drive works slower with small documents.

The truck, called Snowmobile, is designed to transfer (or transport?) data from a client's server to Amazon Web Services cloud storage. Is such an archaic method really necessary to move data to the cloud? The fact is that with a volume of an exabyte or, as often happens, hundreds of petabytes, downloading even through a high-bandwidth channel can take quite a significant amount of time.

For example, uploading one exabyte of data to a cloud storage with a connection of 10 gigabits per second will take... about 26 years. That's why Amazon offers AWS customers data trucking services. 10 of these “Snowmobiles” can transport an exabyte in less than six months, that is, the data transfer rate will be about 514 gigabits per second. Another thing!

Transferring data to cloud storage is quite simple. A truck arrives at the home or office of a client who has ordered data transportation and connects to the network using several cables. Each cable provides data transfer at speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second, and the total throughput speed of data transfer to the Snowmobile can reach up to a terabit per second. With such a connection, it will take about 10 days to fully load a container of 100 petabytes (about 100 thousand terabytes!).

The Snowmobile is a waterproof, refrigerated container 13.7 meters long and 2.9 meters high, which is attached to a semi-trailer and moved by a tractor-trailer. The container requires a 350 kilowatt power source, is protected from physical hacking, encrypts data, and is also equipped with a video surveillance system and GPS. If this is not enough for someone, for an additional fee Amazon will provide armed guards when transporting data.

Film library in your home

Most recently, Western Digital created the largest custom hard drive, My Book Studio Edition II, with a capacity of 4 TB (4 terabytes = 4096 gigabytes). This device is designed specifically for Mac computer owners. The price of the largest hard drive is relatively high, namely $650. Its practicality is unquestionable; it can easily hold about 1,500 DVD movies, as well as about 800 thousand digital photos and about 1 million MP3 music files.

There is a cheaper option!

You can, of course, get by with a slightly smaller working volume - it will also be cheaper. My Book Studio Edition II can have a volume of 1 and 2 terabytes. By the way, in Russian online stores the price for such hard drives ranges from 7,000 to 17,000 rubles (depending on the volume). The disk is connected to the computer via a USB port. My Book Studio Edition II is quite bulky, its dimensions are 98x166x154 mm, and its weight exceeds 2.6 kg. Of course, power is provided through the network adapter; physically, the disk consists of two two-terabyte physical disks in a single housing.

What other advantages?

Judging by consumer reviews, size is the only advantage of this hard drive. The consumer properties of the model are strongly criticized by users. In particular, users criticize the fragile case, which is easily deformed and scratched. In addition, computers periodically “do not see” it, and it is not easy to detect it again.

Users also criticize the speed of information transfer from the drive; it does not rise above 12-14 MB/sec, but is often much lower. Reinstalling drivers and other manipulations do not help the situation. Users were also not satisfied with the My Book Studio Edition software called WD Drive Manager, which is not able to determine the percentage of free disk space and provides a minimum set of information about the drive.

To take or not to take?

To summarize, we can safely recommend that readers do not mess with My Book Studio Edition: this disk has no analogues in terms of capacity, but the quality of this drive does not stand up to much criticism, despite the fact that the price of the hard disk is quite high.

Over the past few years, the conquest of new records in increasing the capacity of hard drives has been proceeding with a noticeable creak. Manufacturers continue to squeeze all the juice out of perpendicular magnetic recording. Thus, the transition to a helium environment and sealed blocks with magnetic plates made it possible to increase the number of plates in a HDD to 8 or even 9 pieces, which Toshiba noted when creating a series of 3.5-inch HDD MG07ACA with a capacity of 14 TB.

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Recently, Western Digital was able to squeeze a little more out of the combination of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and HelioSeal technologies. The new product from the Ultrastar DC HC620 series came with a capacity of 15 TB, which is an absolute record in the production of commercial HDDs. Unfortunately, the company does not disclose how many magnetic plates are included in the model. The series also includes a 14 TB version, as well as versions with SAS 12 Gbit/s and SATA 6 Gbit/s interfaces.

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The additional terabyte included in the 3.5-inch hard drive reduces the cost of ownership of hard drive storage systems. First, there are now 60 TB more hard drives in a standard 4U rack with 60 hard drives than before. Secondly, the watt/terabyte ratio decreased by 31%, which indicates an increase in energy efficiency. Both of these factors will have a positive impact on the development of cloud and other remote services, for which volume is not the least important.

As for the main characteristics of the new product, the spindle speed of the 15 TB Ultrastar DC HC620 model is 7200 rpm. Average access latencies are 4.16 ms, and average seek times are 7.7 ms for reading and 12 ms for writing (hello SMR technology). The disk cache buffer size is 512 MB. The operating consumption of the model with the SATA interface reaches 6.4 W, and with the SAS interface - 8.3 W. Idle consumption is 5.2 and 6.2 W, respectively. The price of the issue is not reported.