Data storage devices and their specifications

Data has become one of the most valuable assets a person, business, company, enterprise, corporation, or organization has and must protect. Computing and storage devices that process and store data must be reliable and available, and above all else, secure.

In this section, we'll look at disk drive hardware and configuration, data storage and transfer protocols and technologies, and we'll also take a hard look at RAID.

Hard drive specifications

On the most basic functioning levels, technology in hard disk drives, of all shapes and sizes is virtually the same. The following diagram shows the essential internal components of a basic hard disk drive. As this diagram illustrates...