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PC Components
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Drives (336)
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CPUs / Processors (180)
Drives: SSDs, HDDs, External Hard Drives & Blu-ray/DVD
All Drives (ODDs, SSDs, HDDs & Card Readers)
Drives are all physical devices that enable access to external storage media. Well-known classic data carriers, such as magnetic tapes or floppy disks, are practically extinct today. Even reading and writing devices for optical storage media, such as DVD burners, Blu-ray drives, and Blu-ray burners, are becoming increasingly rare. In the PC sector, drives today mostly include internal and external hard drives (HDDs, SSDs) as well as USB sticks. Card readers for memory cards are also considered drives due to their basic function.
External Drives - Uncomplicated Media Consumption, Data Storage, and Transport
Despite their declining importance, optical drives are still in demand today, and many digital consumer items such as video games or movies are still offered on optical discs. DVD burners also securely store data backups for the long term and remain flexible with rewritable discs (e.g., DVD-RW). Blu-ray burners enable the storage of significantly larger amounts of data, and read-only Blu-ray drives bring HD cinema experiences home to the living room.
USB sticks with high capacities and external hard drives or SSDs connected via USB are more commonly encountered. With the help of internal or external card readers, data from cameras or tablets can be transferred via flash-based memory cards - if these cannot also be connected via a USB cable.
Particularly large amounts of data can be stored on network servers (NAS) and accessed via LAN, while data is increasingly being stored in the cloud. Data stored on cloud servers can also be accessed anytime on the go.
Internal Drives: From HDD to SSD
Hard drives (HDDs) are the cheapest option for storing large amounts of data. Hard drives in the 3.5-inch format are usually connected via SATA and offer extremely high capacities. The downside is comparatively low read and write speeds as well as mechanical noises when accessing the data.
Solid State Discs - SSDs - are based on flash memory and operate silently. In addition to the classic 2.5-inch SSD, the M.2 standard is becoming more prevalent. While a 2.5-inch SSD needs to be connected to the motherboard and power supply with a SATA cable, M.2 SSDs are plugged directly into the motherboard. In addition to SATA, the NVMe protocol is used for M.2 SSDs (and U.2 SSDs). With Non-Volatile Memory Express, SSDs can be connected via PCIe lanes, enabling extremely fast data access.