15 interesting things about computer hard drives that not everyone knows (P2)

There are many interesting things about computer hard drives that you may not know.

15 interesting things about computer hard drives that not everyone knows (P1)

9. The hard drive is also limited by the space on the platter for the read/write head to be able to read information. A magnetically encoded area of ​​the platter that is too small can result in data not being read.

10. While all of this seems bleak for the future of HDDs, there are also innovative solutions to these problems, such as Helioseal technology. WD’s Ultrastar He12 helium hard drives replace the air inside the bulkhead with helium, thereby increasing the limit on the number of platters that can fit in a case, making 12TB of storage even more compact.

11. Speaking of compact storage, remember that the first hard drive was about the size of a refrigerator. When compared to modern storage hard drives, the 350 Disk Storage Unit hard drive takes up about 10 billion times more space per MB than today’s average hard drive.

12. Most of the data is circulated in social networks and video platforms. For example, Facebook stored around 300PB (petabytes) in their data center in 2013, which means that number has grown tremendously now. YouTube, which has an estimated 15 years of daily video upload history, stored around 500PB of data in 2015.

13. These numbers are rough estimates. According to Moore’s law, the amount of data held by industries doubles every 1.2 to 2 years.

14. All this information is stored in data centers, large facilities containing row by row of hard drives and servers. And while you might feel like using a computer that doesn’t take a lot of power, a large data center can consume as much power as powering a small city.

15. Now that we have so much space for data centers, building in unexpected places like underwater can have some unexpected benefits. For example, in Microsoft’s underwater data center test in 2015, a large lid full of servers was submerged in the ocean. This can help cool the system as well as speed up data transfer because half of the world lives next to the coast. The Icelandic data tower project also intends to use nature to cool its data centers.