The container of the computer, the location where the user stores all sort of information, is located usually under the hood. This does not mean that you cannot use an external storage device, such as an external hard drive, but this depends very much on the user and on his computing needs.

For example, some users need a very low space, because they do not work with the hard drive that much and they do not store information, just use the information already stored in the computer, such as certain programs and there are other users which need a very large amount of GB, so that they will store more video games, more music tracks and so on.

The heads of the hard drives are also known as Winchester slides. Just look just like an airplane. In fact, there is some air that floats in them, in it true. This is why from time to time, you need to clean the hard drive, because the platters become filled with dust. This is not an operation that can be performed by any user. You need to address to a specialist when you want to clean the hard drive. The heads are not lasers, like I have heard, but they are small electromagnets. The information is stored in this way, thanks to the electric current that passes through the computer, thus through the hard drive as well, the drive electronics and the whole circuits send pulses of current to the head, who guess what… starts to write that information. The pulses are so fast, that you don’t even realise when they work. I mean right now I am writing an article and this is stored in my computer, even though I do not click all the time Save. It is stored thanks to a Microsoft Windows feature, which stores the content from time to time, I don’t know the exact period of time, in case something happens with the computer.

For example, if you are using a desktop, when the power is off, then your work will be lost. Imagine how would a person who wrote ten pages without saving them, feel. So, basically to store some information on the platters, you need electric power. But what happens if the voltages are too high? It may happen the exact situation that happened in the previous case. The information might be lost. When the information is written (luckily, this happens as well), you will see that a head is moving, the one that actually sends those electric pulses to the platters. So, there is no laser here guys, don’t search for it anymore. The hard disk is moved with the help of an engine, which makes it to spin with 5400 rotations per minute, in most of the cases.

Using computers is a must in these times. You can’t do anything without one! The majority of employers ask for computer knowledge, at least the basic one. When doing so many things on a single device, the files start to stack up and the space destined for storage is becoming fuller and fuller. In these next lines we will go over the major sorts of information storage which you can use on your personal computer. All of these shown here are easily found in various stores and online shops at reasonable prices. Start listening and managing your computer correctly!

The first one and maybe the most well known one is the hard disk drive storage or HDD storage. The book definition says this is a random access non volatile digital information storage device. It includes rotating inflexible platters on a spindle driven by a motor enclosed in a protective area. The information is magnetically written and read onto and from the platter by specialized heads that glide above the platters. First, these devices were quite large and without exquisite performance aspect, but nowadays you have even large, several TB HDDs onto your home computers. The advantages behind the HDD drive are the cheap manufacturing processes and the speed of reading or writing from or onto them.

Other information storage units that work on your personal computer are the USB flash drives. These portable wonder are even smaller than the old school floppy disks, but can hold onto them up to 256 GB of information. They consist of a USB plug that connects to the computer and the actual storage room. They are compatible with many systems and can be used by more devices, not much like the CDs, DVDs and other. Year by year, they become more professional and are more able to complete a lot of duties. The prices for these are very small, everyone having a small flash drive memory attached to their key ring. We have all used them for school, work and entertainment, CDs and DVDs being the most popular alternative storage spaces besides HDDs. These small units are actually simple plastic pieces on which there is data written on them magnetically. These storage spaces are usually for one writing activity only, but you can find re-writable ones as well. In the past few years, the appearance of the Blu-Ray disk makes storage even simpler, this type of disk holding up to 25GB on one layer and there are some that have two layers so they hold 50GB of data. Portable and always evolving, this type of storage will not be a thing of the past too soon.

In addition to those mentioned above, the computer industry offers a great variety of other storage units such as memory cards, portable hard disks and many others. Before getting one, you should think about what you are going to use it for.

When it comes to portable storage space, users have two options - HDDs (hard disk drive) and SSDs (solid state drive). But what are the differences between the two and especially, their benefits?

Resistance to accidents
An HDD (hard disk drive) is electronic-mechanical data storage: the storage is done on a magnetic surface disposed on round, rigid, metal platters. Therefore, the first thing to note about HDD is that it has mechanical moving parts which can easily be damaged. From this point of view, however, SSDs are more advantageous. These storage solutions are based mainly on DRAM or flash memory and a microprocessor, therefore, have no moving parts - the storage and transfer of information is accomplished with the help of electric circuits consisting solely of tiny semiconductors.

Writing Speed
Here the advantage is held also by SSD’s. Because data can be accessed at random, because it is not necessary for the head of reading / writing to synchronize with a rotating turntable, SSDs have much lower access times, and because SSD’s have their own CPU, they get high rates of I / O (input / output). In short, are faster than the classical HDDs in terms of writing and reading data. Moreover, the average access time for a SSD is 35-100 microseconds, while the average access time for a HDD is 5000-10000 microseconds; therefore SSDs are approximately 100 times faster than HDD’s.

Power consumption
The third advantage of the SSD (flash SSD) is that it consumes less power than a HDD and is also emitting less heat.

The lifetime
The same SSDs are better at this chapter. The problem with HDDs is that they are made ??of moving parts, and, after long periods of use, the physical damages occur, as with any mechanical machines. On the other hand, flash SSDs have an average lifespan of 300,000 cycles of writing, while the best get even 1.000.0000 writing cycles per cell

Noise levels
>Since the HDDs consist of mechanical parts, are characterized by different specific sounds, so SSDs are quieter.

Price
SSDs remain more expensive than HDDs, so from this point of view HDDs are advantageous - at the beginning of 2010, the hard drives had a price of 0.1 dollars per GB (the 3.5 inch variants) or 0.2 GB dollars (2.5 inches), while SSDs reaching $ 2 per GB.

Storage Capacity
Unfortunately, the storage capacity of SSDs is still relatively small compared with the HDDs. In 2010 the HDD Silicon Power 256GB, SATA 2 was the vaster SSD but also the most expensive. In classical HDD’s, Western Digital WD10TEVT, 1TB, 5400rpm, 8MB, SATA was the leader, having a price half lower than that of an SSD.

Conclusion
Following all the above points, it is easy to see that the SSD memory would be the ideal solution for a laptop or netbook, because it offers many advantages compared to HDDs, especially in terms of data protection. However, they have two important drawbacks: they are more expensive and come in smaller storage capacities. But taking into account the inestimable value of data is recommended that you buy a SSD, at least as a back-up system to the really important information.

The number of computers around the world is huge showing just how important they are. Computers are used both for business and entertainment purposes. So, it has appeared the need for computer technicians. And the ever-growing number of computers in use has as its logical consequence the increase of the demand for computer technicians.

Analysts suggest that this job will become highly demanded in the near future. And that is one reason why career counselors encourage students to embrace this job. Every time we have a problem with our equipment, we call upon a computer technician to come and solve it. If small difficulties can be solved by anyone of us, the complex issues require the skillful touch of a professional.



The computer technician’s job description is vast and varied including tasks ranged from testing, installing, and assembling various parts into a computer, or connecting computers together into a network. Computer technicians can be divided into four categories: repair (hardware or software), network, infrastructure and installation. Irrespective of the category they fall into, computer technicians must have specialized education and training. And, as technology tends to develop at an extremely fast pace, computer technicians need to keep up to date with the latest technological improvements.

A computer hardware technician needs to be trained in the schematics of computer hardware. A certification as an IT technician, along with a degree in electrical engineering might prove to be very useful for the job. Other skills such as problem solving, communication, up to date knowledge of computer hardware are also required of a computer hardware technician.



Among the many responsibilities of a computer hardware technician are: installation, upgrading, maintenance and repair of computers and peripheral equipments, installation and configuration of operating systems and commercial packages, instruction of buyers in respect of the operation and management of the purchased equipments, assistance to clients in solving computer-related issues, monitoring the proper functioning of equipments and making the required modifications to ensure the system’s operation within specified parameters, testing hardware and peripherals for conformity with specifications and requirements, recommend purchase of equipment to control environmental factors that could have an impact on the equipments, permanent update of knowledge and skills to understand the speedy advancements in computer technology.

The payscale for a computer hardware technician varies according to various factors. But he median salary of a computer hardware technician is ranged from 30,000 to 55,000 USD.

If we consider the years of experience, the salary varies from 39,000 USD for under 5 years of experience to over 55,000 USD for 20 or more years of experience. Worst paying cities for computer hardware technician are Atlanta, Georgia and Chicago, Illinois (with little over 40,000 USD). At the other end of the spectrum are Boston, Massachusetts (with an average salary of over 52,000 USD) and Washington, DC (with an average salary of over 54,000 USD).

Taking a look at the company size, it is no great surprise that small companies pay as little as 33,700 USD, medium sized companies’ salary ranges between 40,000 and 47,000 USD. And, needless to say, big companies pay the best salaries for computer hardware technicians, going from 50,000 to 53,000 USD.

Computer hardware components are very important for all of us nowadays because we have all become much more interested in having the possibility of using highly performing computers that might enable us to engage in various activities and perform various tasks well without having to spend too much time in order to succeed in doing this.

There are numerous important aspects which we have discovered in time as computer users and technology advances on a daily basis which means that we always have something new to learn about, something new to discover, analyze and understand.



In this article, we are going to consider an important aspects regarding one of the computer hardware components that is highly popular nowadays and this is because it has proven to be of great help to all of us, namely the USB drive.

The aspects regarding it that we have considered useful to present in this article refers to the possibility of protecting our USB drive with a password so as to always make sure that our important data is secured. At this stage it is important for us to mention the fact that we can protect our important data with a password and access our secret volume by entering the right password. One possible way in which this can be done is by taking advantage of the Rohos Mini Drive which creates hidden and encrypted partitions on the USB flash drive memory. The user will be enabled to work with the files being hidden on this partition without being required to find or install any special program that might enable them to do this. Everything is very simple and it can prove to be a great solution of securing our data sometimes.

There are at lest few important features that should be considered when analyzing Rohos Mini Drive because they are very important when it comes to getting a better understanding of the way in which it functions and in which it could be useful to be used by various computer users. The way in which it functions is by creating the virtual encrypted partition volume within the USV flash drive free space that we have previously mentioned and it automatically detects the USB stick configuration. It has been mainly appreciated for not requiring installation which makes it much more practical to be used without any time being lost by the user in this regard.



The encrypting partition that is created by this program is protected with a password that only the user will be familiar with and the encryption is automatic. It also enables its users to work with a virtual keyboard which can be quite useful to be used for protecting the encrypted disk password from a potential key logger. For those interested in the limit of the encrypted partition size in the case of this program it should be said that it is of 2 GB.

All in all, the idea of using such programs that offer password protection for USB drives is a great one that can prove to be of great help to us as computer users in various cases.