Speaker 1: Streaming TV shows and movies directly to your home is
Speaker 1: a breeze with Netflix. As a Netflix member, you can
Speaker 1: instantly watch TV and movies on your PC, mac, mobile device,
Speaker 1: or right on your television. Get a free thirty day
Speaker 1: trial membership. Go to Netflix dot com, slash brain Stuff
Speaker 1: and sign up today. Welcome to brain Stuff from house
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall
Speaker 1: Brain with today's question, what are the fastest hard disk
Speaker 1: drives available today? If you look back through the recent
Speaker 1: history of personal computers, you can see that there's been
Speaker 1: a trend toward faster and faster hard disc drives and connections.
Speaker 1: Several years ago, the standard was a spinning mechanical hard
Speaker 1: disk drive connected to a parallel A T A connector.
Speaker 1: Then the industry transition to a serial A T A connector,
Speaker 1: first at one point five gigabits per second, then at
Speaker 1: three gigabits per second, and now it's six gigabits per second.
Speaker 1: No mechanical hard disc can really keep up with a
Speaker 1: six gigabit per second connection. The reason they put that
Speaker 1: in place is because of solid state drives. These drives
Speaker 1: can actually pump data fast enough to make use of
Speaker 1: that connection. So that's the latest high speed standard. But
Speaker 1: people always want to go faster, so now they're taking
Speaker 1: solid state drives, putting them on cards, connecting them straight
Speaker 1: into the motherboard using the pc I express connection. Right now,
Speaker 1: that offers a speed of about one gigabyte per second,
Speaker 1: and it could go all the way up to about
Speaker 1: eight gigabytes per second with the current pc I Express design.
Speaker 1: These drives are described by one magazine as brain melting
Speaker 1: lea fast. They can transfer a one gigabyte file and
Speaker 1: about one second. Right now, these super fast drives are
Speaker 1: fairly expensive, about fifty cents a gigabyte compared to a
Speaker 1: dime per gigabyte for a norm most spinning hard disc.
Speaker 1: But even these aren't the fastest hard discs available. If
Speaker 1: you want to be the fastest, you would take dynamic RAM,
Speaker 1: put it on a board, and plug that into the
Speaker 1: pc I Express slot. Dynamic RAM has some disadvantages. It's
Speaker 1: pretty big, relatively speaking, and you have to keep power
Speaker 1: to it constantly, which means you need a big battery
Speaker 1: to back it up in case the power goes out
Speaker 1: or somebody turns off the machine. And it's also pretty
Speaker 1: expensive about twenty dollars per gigabyte or so. However, it
Speaker 1: is shockingly fast, much faster than flash memory. You could,
Speaker 1: in theory, think of it as using up the entire
Speaker 1: PC I Express bandwidth. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, is it how staff works dot Com?
Speaker 1: Streaming TV shows and movies directly to your home is
Speaker 1: a breeze with Netflix. As a Netflix member, you can
Speaker 1: instantly watch TV and movies on your PC, mac, mobile device,
Speaker 1: or right on your television. Get a free thirty day
Speaker 1: trial membership. Go to Netflix dot com slash brain stuff
Speaker 1: and sign up today