Tip #8: Flash Drives & Hard Drives - Exploring the Internet

In later articles I will be talking about flash drives and computer operating systems, so I decided to make some important distinctions between Flash Drives & Hard Drives. 

       Flash Drives & Hard Drives


Flash Drives

Flash Drives, aka USB drives or thumb drives, are small, thumb-sized storage devices that can plug into the USB port of just about any device with one. They are now also making USB-C Drives that serve the same purpose as well, with many computers doing away with the standard USB port. 

They come in sizes as small as 5 to 8GB (21$ for 10 of them on amazon), all the way to 1 Terabyte for hundreds of dollars. The SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe (1TB) USB-C drive is about $155 apparently. 

Largest Flash Drives: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/largest-flash-drives/

But anyway, their main usage is storage and file transfer, and are very useful for making and storing backups of important information due to their portability and ease of use. 

Rarely are they used to actually run applications or software due to the ease at which they can disconnect from the computer, but it is definitely possible, and perhaps growing more and more useful as the storage size of USBs increase.

 

Hard Drives

Hard drives, whether Solid State Drives (SSD) or the OG Hard Disk Drives (HDD), they are the more clunky bit of storage built into the laptop/computer, and are almost never seen on the outside of a computer. The largest hard drive currently on the market is the Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS Hard Drive (18TB HDD) for about $500.

Largest Hard Drives: https://www.alphr.com/largest-hard-drive-you-can-buy/

Hard drives are made to store everything that exists on your computer, from the startup instructions & code, the pictures of your cat you uploaded from your phone, to the applications you launch to do anything. 

If your computer is on, you should most certainly never disconnect the hard drive, as this will probably corrupt the whole system. On Mac, there is an option to unmount the drive so that it can be safely disconnected while the computer is on, but it is still safer to just shutdown first. 

Most people never think to disconnect these drives anyway, but doing so can prove quite useful, especially if a computer breaks down for some reason before you could back anything up. Chances are the hard drive still works and has all your data still saved, so removing it and putting it in a new computer can allow you to pick up right where you left off. 

Related - Difference between SSD & HDD: https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/ssd-vs-hdd

 

Similarities & Differences

These devices can actually both be used the same exact way. You can mount and 

unmount hard drives as much as you please, and move them interchangeably between computers. The only downside is HDDs are actually a bit more fragile than a USB drive, so shaking it too much can render it unusable very quickly. SSD drives do not have this downside.

USB drives can likewise be used as hard drives; you can watch videos, install applications, or even entire operating systems on a flash drive. If your computer had no hard drive whatsoever, but you had a 128GB flash drive, you could still use that computer like normal after installing everything the computer needs onto that drive. Connecting to the internet, doing homework, projects, editing files, coding… anything you could do if you had a normal hard drive you can do with a flash drive.

Back in the day, and even in movies today, people took advantage of this, and would install programs to execute as soon as a flash drives enters a computer, sometimes taking it over completely. I’m pretty sure this stopped working after Windows 7; the computer has to ask for permission to open or execute any external devices. Still pretty cool to see though.

 But back to the most important thing: Yes, you can run an entire computer off a flash drive.

Other differences between Hard Drives & Flash Drives: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-hard-drives-and-flash-drives/


 

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