Just recently, Western Digital (WD) come up a brilliant idea of putting some personality to their hard disk products, particularly the WD Caviar Series in blue, green, and black. Making a rare introduction to the already established brand name is fun, and it becomes more and real fun because they turned their ideas into cartoon movies. As of the writing of this post, WD uploaded 4 episodes to introduce their hard drives. I embed the four episodes to the video section of this site, you can watch it in the following links:

Western Digital (WD) is one of the worlds leading manufacturer of magnetic hard drives. WD is the maker of hard drives that are known to withstand enormous strain suitable for mission critical, data storage projects. Last May 4, 2010, WD publicized their willingness to acquire the magnetic media operation of Hoya Corporation and Hoya Magnetics Singapore Pte. Ltd. WD agreed to pay 22 billion yen (about $235 million) for facilities, equipment, intellectual property, working capital, and R&D of Hoya's media sputtering operations, based in Tuas, Singapore.

Hard Disk manufacturers are pushing the storage capacity of hard disk drive (HDD). The era of GigaBytes (GB) is about to over when more and more release of TeraBytes (TB) are out in the market and price will follow the same trend of going down. I remember my first hard disk, the Seagate with 4 GB in capacity in Windows 98 system, that was actually huge back then. When I bought my 80 GB Samsung hard disk, I thought I cannot fill it but after 4 years of using it, I only have 9 GB space. It is still huge with the type of media I am storing but I chose to buy a new 160 GB Samsung hard disk drive. Now I wonder again, how can I fill that 2 TB hard disk. And if I am to browse my files one by one, how long to finish it.

VelociRaptor is a SATA hard disk released by Western Digital (WD). It is said to be the fastest hard drive in the planet, at least according to WD. This post is not about to measure the manufacturers claim but to translate the claim of Western Digital into layman's terms. I will try here to dissect some technical jargon into terms comprehensible by the average Joe.

First is the name of this SATA drive. Velociraptor is a dinosaur that is smaller than human weighing only up to 15 kg. Despite its size, this dinosaur has a reputation of downing very large prey and known according to its speed and agility. Now let's go with the technical specification of the WD VelociRaptor SATA hard drive.

What is a hard disk partition

Partition is a physical division of hard disk storage space. To make it simple, imagine a large room, divide that room into two or more rooms by putting walls in between. In hard disk, each room is called a partition, each partition can be formatted into any file system and can store any information, and each will logically act as different hard disk. If you partition your hard disk, it will look as if you have more than one hard disk installed in your unit.

What is Linux?

Linux is an operating system (OS) developed by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus released his source code under GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The source code can be freely modified and redistributed commercially and non-commercially by anyone under the GNU GPL. Then what is an OS and how it works? So many questions, huh... When you turned on your computer, the processor will trigger the Basic Input Output System (BIOS), the BIOS will then look for the the boot device (it can be your CD/DVD, floppy disk, flash drive, but mostly hard disk). An OS must be in the boot device and when it loads you can see that the computer opens. In simple terms, OS is the one that will make your computer open. This statement however underestimates OS, and unacceptable in real sense. I recommend the following articles for more information: (a) Operating system (b) Windows Bootup Process