With all the talk on new Solid State Drives and the drive transfer speeds they offer, it’s easy to overlook the time-honored, platter-based hard drive. The fact remains that there is still no better price per gigabyte when it comes to storage than going with the traditional hard drive.

The advances in technology on platter-based hard drives are keeping them as viable data storage devices and, while it may be hard to fathom, today’s 5400RPM drives are even faster than 7200RPM drives from a just few years ago. Why? Spin speed is no longer the single determining factor on platter-based hard drive performance. With the advent of PMR, the areal density of today’s drives is increasing and head movement is faster because the distance to data points is shorter. That probably sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, so let’s break it down some more… Article Continues…