The focus for this segment is going to be on the reasons for using a Flash Drive or an internal Magnetic drive as a second hard drive for adding storage to your machine.  In some cases you are going to want to add the hard drive from an older computer to a newer one, but if you are planning to buy a hard drive some considerations should be taken into account.

Traditionally when someone says “hard disk drive” or “hard drive” they are speaking about a magnetic media device.  However, this is starting to change.  Internal drives based on flash technology are increasingly showing up and USB connected external drives are becoming more popular.

First lets talk about why you should use one or the other.  Traditional magnetic media hard drives do not hold the advantage any more.  Flash technology is advancing rapidly and some SSD (Solid State Drives) are expected to increase life expectancy to 100 years or more.  This is far greater than Magnetic media, which generally has a warranty level of 3 years or less although in reality magnetic drives tend to last much longer than that.  I have used drives that were older than ten years without issue.

Even the low cost flash based thumb drives available today have warranties of 5 years.  However, for a long time USB flash based drives were thought to be less reliable. The confusion comes from the fact that early USB devices had a rating of about one million read/writes on the transistors.  Although that sounds like a lot it really isn’t. Think about that document you have opened and changed a hundred times or the databse you keep adding to. The problem is that even if you changed only one letter of data in a file the entire block, if not the entire file would have to be re-written.  That was a lot of transistor gates being accessed and changed. 

The reason SSD drives are achieving longer life is that they are getting smarter.  Special math is being used to prevent excessive read/writes. In some cases if a particular block is being written to frequently the block position may be moved to another location to add “life” to the transistors.  Second, other than the miniature transistor gates opening and closing, the drives do not have mechanical parts.  Magnetic hard disk drives generally fail due to mechanical issues or due to the magnetic surface being damaged.  Basically they die from normal wear and tear. This is not an issue with flash or solid state technology.

SSD drives are also as much as 100 times faster.  This is due to the fact that data is read/written directly to the location.  In the case of a magnetic hard drive the magnetic media platters have to spin until the head is in the correct position to read or write data.

The bottom line is that if you need additional space connecting a flash drive may be the way to go. You can easily expand your storage capacity at a low cost simply by plugging in an external SSD or Flash drive.

So, why are we talking about magnetic hard drives at all? 

Well for one thing this is still the primary drive of most computers.  Over time this may change, but for now nearly every desktop machine is equipped with a magnetic media device as the primary drive.  The main reason for using magnetic media drives however is free parts. 

If you have purchased a new computer and still have the old one you might want to add that drive to the new system either as a backup for important data or to extend the storage capacity of the main drive.  Also, a lot of older cheaper machines that your friends or coworkers are replacing may have very usable, good drives in them.

Free, is about as cheap as it gets.