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