HDD vs SSD – Difference and Comparison
Over the last 20+ years, people have used a very popular hardware device called a hard drive. The typical hard drive is a mechanical device that has a spindle inside of it that reads over a magnetic disk (platters) to retrieve your stored data. These became common place in computers many years ago.
Over the past few years there has been another type of drive that came out in the market. They are called Solid State Drives (‘SSD’ for short). SSDs allow for extremely quick and easy access to your data, so you do not experience long delays when accessing your data.
SSDs are completely electronic (no mechanical devices are used in its operation). This is what allows for the quick and easy access to data I mentioned earlier.
Now that you have a quick explanation of the two types of drives, I am going to give you some pros and cons of both of them.
Pros for Mechanical Hard Drives
- Cheaper to buy
- Usually can get more disk space for less money.
- Will be a better choice for storing important information (e.g., family photos, personal bank info, attorney letters, etc.). Note: You should have a backup of these files on external disks anyway. Never trust a hard drive to never fail.
Pros for Solid State Drives
- SSD are not (are at least should not be) affected by magnetism
- Practically no heat to worry about when using SSDs
- No moving parts = no noise to bother you
- SSDs use almost no power (less stress on your computer’s power supply)
- SSDs will be more reliable, due to the fact that they do not have mechanical parts in them
So there you have it. Both types of drives are good for different situations.
In my opinion, if you really want/need a fast hard drive, then go for an SSD.
On the other hand, if you need/want a lot of disk space to store important information on, then you will be more cost effective going with a mechanical hard drive.
Posted in Computers, Internet and Servers
Website Subdirectory vs. Subdomain: What is the Difference?
In this blog post, I am going to give a brief explanation of what sub-directories and sub-domains are in the context of websites. Which one is the best for a website? Well that is not an easy question to answer, however I’ll give my opinion (and experience) and let you make the final decision.
Simply put, a sub-directory is a directory right off a domain name (e.g., www.example.com/subdirectory).
A sub-domain is a little different. They look like this: mywebsite.example.com
First you must understand that in my experience, both sub-directories and sub-domains are not treated the same way by search engines (e.g., Google, Bing).
If I put something on www.example.com/myfiles, Google will see the “myfiles” part as a part of the main www.example.com domain.
However Google, from my experience, will treat a sub-domain as if it were separate from your main domain, and will not count myfiles.example.com as a part of your original example.com ranking.
To recap: Sub-directories are seen by search engines as a part of your main domain (e.g., www.example.com/myfiles goes with www.example.com).
Sub-domains are seen by search engines as separate from your main domain (e.g., myfiles.example.com does not go with www.example.com).
Do you see the difference? So which is better for a website you ask?
Well in my opinion:
Use a sub-directory when you want to make sure that your main domain (e.g., www.example.com) gets more attention from search engines, and in turn, hopefully a better search engine ranking.
Use a sub-domain when you either do not care about adding value to your main website and/or when you have a website or service so different from your main website, that you want search engines to treat it as if it were separate from your main domain.
Posted in Computers, Internet and Servers
5 Myths People Believe About Microsoft Windows
This is a list of things I can think of that people I have encountered (or have read online) said that they believe about Microsoft Windows. There are a lot of myths floating around out there, and I am going to try to debunk a few.
- It is always best to manually install Windows Updates, since having Windows Update automatically install updates for you can break your system with a bad update.
True…a bad Windows update can render the operating system install useless. However, where the myth comes in is the idea that it is always bad to have Windows automatically do updates for you.
Windows updates contains fixes which include security fixes. Without these security fixes, your computer is vulnerable to many “nasties” out there that may exploit a security vulnerability that was found.
I would say most computer users would never (I repeat…never) install updates on their own, unless the operating system did it for them. Why? Simple. Many computer users do not have a good understanding of computer security and they would not want to be bothered with manually installing system updates.
I alone manage 20+ Windows systems (not counting several Linux boxes). I absolutely do not have the time to go through each and every system, to manually install system updates. Having the operating system do automatic updates for me saves a lot of time.
- The User Account Control (UAC) that was introduced with Windows Vista does not really help stop malware, and in fact gets in the way.
To be fair, UAC can potentially “get in the way” so to speak, but what I suspect many computer users do not know (or at least understand) is that UAC makes it easy to be a system administrator and a limited system user at the same time.
In short, UAC assists a system administrator with his or her job by allowing the administrator to perform administrative tasks while still being secure running under his or her own limited user account by default.
Also, if you click “no” to a UAC prompt, and the program it prevents from running due to you clicking “no” contains malware, then UAC did technically stop the malware from running with administrator privileges in the first place. So anyone who says that UAC is not a security feature is technically incorrect.
- Windows is insecure no matter how many times it gets updated.
Windows is not “inherently insecure”. Windows supports many different security features like: Access Control Lists, Mandatory Access Control, Disable Memory Execution, Address Space Layout Randomization, integrated firewall (Windows Firewall), etc.
Not to mention Windows NT was designed from the beginning to be a multi-user, networking capable operating system, for small and large businesses alike to use. This was before the consumer NT versions came out onto the market (e.g., Windows XP).
- Windows has a fragmentation problem with the NTFS file-system. Where Linux and UNIX file-systems do not have this problem.
Fragmentation happens on any file-system. It is a classic ordering problem. When you delete files on NTFS, ext4, ext3, UFS, FAT16, FAT32, XFS, ReFS, ZFS, etc., you leave gaps in the file-system.
These gaps will be filled with other files, but you will also have files before and after the new file. So when the computer goes to access the data, it has to sift through all of the data to find the bits and pieces it needs to complete the task.
Saying that Linux file-systems (e.g., ext4 or XFS) do not get fragmentation, while Windows file-systems (e.g., NTFS or ReFS) do, is just plain wrong.
- Windows is not stable. It will crash on you at any given moment for no apparent reason. Windows is just unstable.
You will find that in 98%+ of these cases, this is due to bad hardware and/or drivers. This goes for any mature operating system out there not just Windows.
Also, here is a little bit of proof that Windows is not “unstable” as many people (usually Linux users) like to claim.
High Windows Uptime
Notice in the picture, the Windows system uptime is over 100 days straight. This is a Windows 7 media system continuously playing video using the VLC Player.
Posted in Computers, Internet and Servers, Operating Systems