Читать книгу Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen - Страница 23

Your PC’s memory chips hold information only temporarily: Turn off the electricity, and the contents of RAM go bye-bye. If you want to reuse your work, keeping it around after the plug has been pulled, you must save it, typically on a hard drive or possibly in the cloud (which means you copy it to a location on the internet).

The following list describes the most common types of disks and drives:

 Hard drive: The technology’s changing rapidly, with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) now being replaced by solid-state drives (SSDs), which have no moving parts and, to a lesser extent, hybrid drives, which bolt together a rotating drive with an SSD. Each technology has benefits and drawbacks. Yes, you can run a regular HDD drive as your C: drive, and it will work fine. But tablets, laptops, or desktops with SSD drives run like lightning. The SSD wins as speed king. After you use an SSD as your main system (C:) drive, you’ll never go back to a spinning platter, I guarantee.SSDs feature low power consumption and give off less heat than HDDs. SSDs have no moving parts, so they don’t wear out like hard drives. And, if you drop a hard drive and a solid-state drive off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, one of them may survive. Or maybe not.SSDs are great for the main drive, but they may be too expensive for storing pictures, movies, and photos. Price and technical considerations (see the sidebar “Solid-state drives have problems, too”) assure that hard drives will still be around.Hybrid drives combine the benefits and problems of both HDDs and SSDs. Although HDDs have long had caches — chunks of memory that hold data before being written to the drive and after it’s read from the drive — hybrid drives have a full SSD to act as a buffer.If you can stretch the budget, start with an SSD for the system drive and a big hard drive (one that attaches with a USB cable) for storing photos, movies, and music, and then get another drive (which can be inside your PC, outside attached with a USB cable, or even on a different PC on your network) to run File History (see Book 8, Chapter 1). If you want full on-the-fly protection against dying hard drives, get three hard drives — one SSD and two hard drives, either inside the box or outside attached with USB or eSATA cables — and run Storage Spaces (see Book 7, Chapter 4).Many people opt for a fast SSD for files needed immediately coupled with cloud storage for the big stuff. Now that Google offers free unlimited photo storage — and with the rise of data streaming instead of purchased CDs — the need for giant hard drives has hit the skids.For the enthusiast, a three-tier system, with SSDs storing data you need all the time, intermediate backup in the cloud, and multi-terabyte data repositories hanging off your PC is the way to go. Privacy concerns (and the, uh, intervention of various governments) have people worried about cloud storage. Rightfully so.

 SD card memory: Many smaller computers, and some tablets, have built-in SD card readers. (Apple and some Google tablets don’t have SD — the companies would rather sell you more on-board memory at inflated prices!) You probably know Secure Digital (SD) cards best as the kind of memory used in digital cameras and smartphones (see Figure 1-9). A microSD card can be plugged into an SD card adapter to have it function like an SD card. Many desktop computer cases have drive bays. Why not use one of them for a multifunction card reader? That way, you can slip a memory card out of your digital camera and transfer files at will. SD card, microSD card, CompactFlash, memory stick — whatever you have — a multifunction reader can read them all and costs a pittance.Source: Skcard.svg, WikimediaFIGURE 1-9: Comparative sizes of an SD, a miniSD, and a microSD card.

 CD, DVD, or Blu-ray drive: Of course, these types of drives work with CDs, DVDs, and the Sony Blu-ray discs, respectively, which can be filled with data or contain music or movies. CDs hold about 700MB of data; DVDs hold 4GB, or six times as much as a CD. Dual-layer DVDs (which use two separate layers on top of the disc) hold about 8GB, and Blu-ray discs hold 50GB, or six times as much as a dual-layer DVD.Fewer and fewer machines these days come with built-in DVD drives: If you want to schlep data from one place to another, a USB drive works fine — and going through the cloud is even easier. For most storage requirements, though, big, cheap USB drives are hard to beat.

 USB drive or key drive: It's half the size of a pack of gum and able to hold an entire PowerPoint presentation or two or six, plus a few full-length movies. Flash memory (also known as a jump drive, thumb drive, or memory stick) should be your first choice for external storage space or for copying files between computers. (See Figure 1-10.) You can even use USB drives on many DVD players and TV set-top boxes.Pop one of these guys in a USB slot and suddenly Windows knows it has another drive — except that this one’s fast, portable, and incredibly easy to use. It's okay to go for the cheapest flash drive you can find as long as it belongs to a recognized manufacturer.

Source: Wikipedia

FIGURE 1-10: The inside of a USB drive.