

Think of it as the knife that bridges the gap between the force of your cutting hand and a piece of food. The PCB inside of an enclosure essentially acts as an intermediary between the drive and the computer. What part of the enclosure impacts speed? It's the PCB or circuit board. What we are really concerned about is speed. This material choice plays a small role in heat dissipation but is largely about durability, aesthetics and price. Some enclosures are made of plastic, others are made of aluminum. The enclosure is what you typically think of when you imagine a hard drive.

In any consumer hard drive product you will find a HDD or SSD inside of a wonderful housing, this housing is known as the enclosure. These are the most affordable drives, yet due to their mechanical nature they have poorer performance when it comes to speed. Your data is stored on these magnetic platters and a read/write arm moves across them to record your data and to recall your data when it is required. HDDs are made up from multiple magnetic platters that physically spin inside the drive. Most commonly you would know this as Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or Solid State Drive (SSD). The physical drive that lives inside your hard drive is the key player when it comes to speed. I summarize them as the 4 Pillars of Hard Drive Performance: Drive, Enclosure, Connection Interface, Cable / Computer Interface Each and every one of these parts plays a role in the end performance that you will experience as a user. Many parts and components make up a hard drive that you buy off the shelf. Dive deep into the wonderful world of hard drive speeds. This is almost never true and I would like to explain why. I have had many Production Managers assure me that 'I got Thunderbolt Drives so they'll be the fastest and we'll be covered'. This is a common assumption that comes up time and time again. But in most circumstances it won't make a difference.
