It really was about time. If you know the hard disk drive industry at all, you know that they have some marketing people that love to try to make a metal box look like a Corvette. This is hard drive technology, after all, which is frankly, quite amazingly dull. You wouldn’t think it did a lot, if it wasn’t for hard drive failures and high data recovery costs. A lot of business owners like it that way. It’s a sturdy technology that lets you put a lot of information into a small space. Saves paper, too. Frankly, a hard drive still provides superb storage, even when it’s in the classic spindle and platter format. Although if you were talking to a marketer, he’d tell you it was more exciting than the moon landing!

A Seagate Hard Drive

A Seagate Hard Drive – more advanced than the space shuttle?

This article on hdd specifications from PC World is a great no-nonsense look at specs, and what to look for when you need an additional storage point. Someone needed to say it, and I’m glad that PC World did. Take it from us: there are really only so many things that matter when it comes to hard drive storage. In essence (with perhaps the exception of SSD drives and hybrids), this is very much the same technology that has been around for 20+ years.

On the other hand, PC World still is PC World, and of course their plug of USB 3.0 drives is funny only because they RECOMMEND them as a performance boost. My friends, we can tell you that unless you’re a robot, you’re not going to “sense” the milliseconds of time savings you will get from USB 3.0. One could probably say that about PCs – both laptops but DEFINITELY laptops – over even the past 15 years! But, let’s remember that this is a magazine that survives by its advertisers, and making them happy first (after the reader, of course) is always going to be the plan. Makes one wonder if these guys are still publishing a print edition, frankly. Always interesting, whatever the case!