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| FastSilicon's Guide To Storage Technology: Part 1 |
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| Wednesday, 03 January 2007 | ||||||
Page 1 of 4  EIDE, or sometimes
called simply IDE disks, are the cheapest and lowest end of consumer
mass storage devices. What makes them low end? Well for starters,
compared to their brethren, they are just slower. I am using slow as
a relative term, because it's not like you can move 50 million groups
of information every second can you? IDE/EIDE mass storage devices
are just plain slow. The drive itself is usually comprised of 6-10
platters (the individual metal discs that hold the data), two heads for
each platter, and a spindle speed (speed at which it rotates) set
nice and low at either 5400 or 7200 revolutions per minute. Now, this
isn't exactly a slow rotation. Can you move your arm in a circle 5400
times in a minute and accurately hit any point on your arm on every
revolution? No. But a machine can. The main difference between the
lowest end of mass storage devices and the highest end is their
spindle speed. The faster a platter spins, the faster the read heads
can read data off it.
 In the midst of
all of this negativity, IDE/EIDE drives have 2 significant advantages
over their faster, more expensive brethren. The first of these is
price. When it comes down to it, IDE/EIDE disks are just plain cheap.
300 Gigabyte drives can be had for just $70. That is a nice chunk of
storage for cheap, agreed? The second major benefit of IDE/EIDE
storage is their platform adoption. IDE/EIDE is the most common
storage option on consumer grade PC's, and is widely available. Also
on a side note, as a sort of secondary point to advantage 2, is the
mass array of storage options in IDE/EIDE disks. You can have a very
large storage system for only a few hundred dollars. We are talking
2-4 Terabytes of storage capacity for less than $500. IDE/EIDE disks
are absolutely unmatchable in terms of storage per dollar. Case and
point: If you are looking for cheap and dirty massive amounts of
storage, there is nothing better than a large disk array of IDE
drives.
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