WolfKeeper 06:13, 29 August 2006 (UTC) CP/M -> MS-DOS -> Microsoft Windows. The floppies were used to boot off and install software, so I guess they got lumbered with A and B and the hard drive got C. Originally IBM PCs came with 1-2 floppy drives, and a hard drive but the system could take two floppies which is useful for copying disks. AverageAmerican 05:33, 29 August 2006 (UTC) I'm sure I have seen systems with B drives, particularly one 5.25 and a 3 inch drive. This info would be useful since many people have not really thought about it and would be interesting trivia. Maybe somebody knows?Īlso why I have never seen a "B" drive? I'm sure there are people who set it up to have a "B" drive but this is not the default setting on many computers? Even the keyword "C Drive" redirects to this article. Is there any historical reason why the hard drive of a computer is called the "C" drive? I used to think that since it is the primary drive on many hardware and software configurations it would get the "A" name, but it got stuck with "C". It seems to me that while it may well be true that the increase is not linear, the explanation given does not show it to be - only that it increases. This means that no failures attributed to the head-disk interface were seen before at least 50,000 start-stop cycles during testing." For example, the Maxtor DiamondMax series of desktop hard drives are rated to 50,000 start-stop cycles. However, the decay rate is not linear-when a drive is younger and has fewer start-stop cycles, it has a better chance of surviving the next startup than an older, higher-mileage drive (as the head literally drags along the drive's surface until the air bearing is established). Most manufacturers design the sliders to survive 50,000 contact cycles before the chance of damage on startup rises above 50%. "In CSS drives the sliders carrying the head sensors (often also just called heads) are designed to reliably survive a number of landings and takeoffs from the disk surface, though wear and tear on these microscopic components eventually takes its toll. lee 03:51, 12 August 2006 (UTC)Īround paragraph 11 or 13 under "Mechanics and magnetics" reads: Your 100GB Flash drive wouldn't last very long if you ran a swapfile or heavy-duty server loads on it, though, because of Flash's limited write durability (it'll literally start burning out after a while), so I don't know how useful it'd be. Carcharoth 10:58, 8 August 2006 (UTC) The biggest problem would be finding a way to connect 100 memory sticks at once (though if you did some creative USB plumbing, it could happen). comparison section, not criticism section. Comparing hard disks to flash memory and DRAM would be a good section for this article. Could you do that by connecting up 100 1 GB memory sticks? It might seem a silly idea and too compartmentalised, but just wondering. uberpenguin 15:18Z You say "100 GB of flash memory". You could obtain 100 GB of flash memory or DRAM, but it would be cost prohibitive and bulky and there aren't many reasons you would need the lower latency and higher throughput of solid state memory in a mass storage capacity. Hard drives provide cheap mass storage at the cost of speed, but this is generally an acceptable trade off due to various optimizations and tricks in modern VFS layers. We want massive amounts of storage but generally cannot afford for that storage to take its form as faster semiconductor memory. What sort of alternative did you have in mind? -lee 04:22, 6 August 2006 (UTC) I don't see how that's a "criticism" it's just the result of economics. Shouldn't the article contain a criticism section about the fact that hard disk speed is a big throttle in overall computer performance and that no good replacement has been developed?īMW Z3 12:49, 2 August 2006 (UTC) Maybe, but hard disks are fast enough now that they aren't nearly as bad as they used to be.and cheap enough that if you need more speed, you can just RAID them together.
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