Drives & Storage

Our Drives & Storage category contains everything relating to mass data storage, both magnetic and optical.

This includes mechanical hard drives, optical drives (CD-ROM, combo drives, DVD variants, multiburners, DVD-RAM), SSDs (Solid State Drives).  We also supply tape drives (popular formats include LTO-1 – LTO-9, DDS3, DLT, T1000, TS11xx).  We keep older technology such as floppy drives and SuperDisks, Zip Drives and MicroDrives in this part of the site too.

Drives may be internal or external, in a dedicated housing.  NAS (Network Attached Storage), tape libraries, specialist storage servers and external RAID boxes are also in this section.  If you require a  chassis, we frequently have available both free standing and rackmount options. We will be able to offer the caddies/trays/cannisters of your choice as well.

All form factors reside here, full height, half height, 8″, 5 1/4″, 3 1/2″, 2 1/2″, 1.8″ 1.3″, 1″, M.2, mSATA, U.2 and more.

The speed of all devices is measured in terms of the rate of data transfer.  The spin speed of the platters  partly determines this.  The major manufacturers have made drives with spin speeds from 15,000 RPM down to 1,200 RPM. The modern mainstream drives most users are familiar with tend to be 5,400 or 7,200 (particularly at the consumer laptop/desktop PC end). We use drives of 10,000 or 15,000 RPM speeds more notably in business/enterprise level machinery.

Storage devices use a wide variety of interfaces.  We source vintage equipment with ESDI (Enhanced Small Disk Interface), CTL-I (Controller Interface), SDI (Standard Disk Interconnect) or parallel connections.  More familiar may be PATA (Parallel ATA), SATA (Serial ATA), SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) , SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). More recently FC (Fibre Channel), PCIe NVMe and other emerging technology are becoming the norm.