Data Storage Revolution

Written By: Bibby On: 29/07/2009Time(18:03:59)

Imagine, if you will, an electronic world where pulses of data zip along minutely thin metal pathways on their journey between chips of all sizes. Now imagine yourself as one of these tiny pulses zooming towards a giant metal enclosure with a strange whirring sound emanating from within. Inside this enclosure you find a blur of huge metal disks spinning and giant arms furiously fluttering forwards and backwards across the vast expanse of the disks.

The metal box has been known for a long time now as a standard storage device which contains your data; pictures, videos, emails, documents etc. This device, known as a Hard Disk Drive (HDD), comes from the not-so-distant past but forms such a wildly different component to anything else inside your computer. Of course there are such things as CDs and DVDs but they rely upon the same principle of data storage as hard drives.

Other forms of storage also exist - at present something called Solid State Drives (SSD) are becoming an unstoppable force. SSDs contain colonies of homes for pulses of data - each bit of data living in personal blocks within silicon chips. HDDs on the other hand just translate electronic information into a magnetic collection of particles on the surface of spinning disks. Due to the ways in which they operate these devices have their ups and downs:
HDDs
- large storage space,
- quite cheap.
SSDs
- very fast,
- low access times in reading/writing data,
- can access multiple files simultaneously,
- no moving parts so less prone to damage.

As HDDs have been around for a longer time than SSDs they have gained technological advances over the years but SSDs are pretty new and there’s so much room for improvement and development which is happening right now. They certainly have the potential to overthrow HDDs from their throne!

You may already know that from time to time you should ‘defrag’ your hard drive to retain performance. Defragmenting is the name given to the process whereby files that have been separated over two or more locations in a hard drive are pieced back together as one continual string of bytes. This fragmentation of files occurs when changes are made to a file - new file information has to be added to the hard drive as and where it can fit into existing data. If you were to leave your computer going for a long time without undertaking any sort of defrag the performance will drop dramatically.

To defrag is only one part of the solution to gaining performance on a hard drive. Since Windows allows the position of files to be changed and since the giant arm that parades across the hard drive disks has to physically move between them it makes sense to ensure that highly accessed files sit together. I was first introduced to this concept back in the days of Microsoft Windows 3.1 by Norton’s Speeddisk software. There have been numerous other pieces of software made over the years each with their own ways of optimizing files. The only one that has really ever given the user the power to make their own optimization strategy is called MyDefrag.

MyDefrag, created by Jeroen Kessels, has taken defragmentation software one step further by allowing users to produce their own scripts that command Jeroen’s defrag engine to position files exactly where they wish. Sure, there are other software packages that allow certain files to be put into a zone but MyDefrag grants greater precision and control. If creating a script sounds like too much effort for a person to get to grips with then the software also comes with pre-made scripts as conjured up by Jeroen himself.

Compared to other defrag software MyDefrag’s engine is both fast and clever at arranging file positions to ensure the least amount of gaps are open to let in small file fragments created by Windows. On top of this Jeroen Kessels has built up a wish list of features to add to the software for which he receives many suggestions through his forum. Considering the age of HDD technology it’s a shame that it was only until now that someone has produced such a comprehensive utility as MyDefrag.

As Windows is the determining factor behind the fragmentation of files this still happens to data on SSDs. But since SSDs have the ability to access multiple locations at the same time this once known side-effect of Windows is now a benefit.

Data storage has actually become exciting with SSD technology and Jeroen's work with old tech! Here's to Jeroen's last stand for HDDs and here's to SSDs - hurrah!