Another Day With My PC

If you’ve been following the entries in my blog since its inception, you would notice that I couldn’t seem to emphasize enough the importance of defragging your hard drive. I guess any computer analyst or aficionado, both budding and established, shares the opinion that this method of optimization is sometimes the only option as far as improving the performance of your disks is concerned.

The hard disk is the most important storage device in your PC. It houses the most important application in your system (the OS), and the other programs that you frequently access. Windows also frequently resort to it in case your actual physical memory is too small. I have no reservations then in saying that the hard disk is an indispensable PC component.

You may contend though, that your DVD drive could easily take the cudgels for your hard drive in case the latter decides to take the day off and conks out on you. Indeed, the capacity of current optical drives could already rival the size of a standard fixed disk. However, it cannot match the role or functionality that hard disks offer. For one thing, the capacity of their latest models is exponentially larger than that of their optical counterparts’.

A disk cannot be considered as a primary storage device if it doesn’t have the size and speed to store and read all the applications that you’re using or may want to use. Sure, other disks could match the fixed ones in this category by adding numbers. The numbers here don’t refer to their capacity though, but to their quantity.

I was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have been able to live during the time when it was a luxury to have a drive. Old PCs didn’t automatically come with hard drives. All they usually have is a floppy drive slot. The applications weren’t that large then, so shuffling floppies to load and run programs were not so frustrating or impractical. Everything changed when programs bloated. DOS was dethroned as the OS king, and Windows paved the way in making hard drives a staple in every PC package.

While a DVD disk is fairly large enough to house several software, it cannot conveniently serve as the primary storage device because it’s simply just not big enough. You may contend that you could always imitate the disk shuffling of old, but this is inconvenient and time-consuming. The fact that multi-tasking is the order of the era makes that old practice impossible. Doing several things at the same time would then require you to have several optical drives. People just don’t have the time or the patience for this.

I don’t see the hard drive being replaced by a new type of storage media anytime soon. I know it’s an old technology. But then again, so is the monitor. Of course, there will definitely be new innovations as far as its architecture is concerned. However, the concept would still be the same. The primary storage devices of the future would still be more or less permanent. It would still remain fixed no matter how big or efficient other portable media would become.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 10:15 am and is filed under PC Optimization . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.