We are drug addicts. Not to green cannabis or MDMA, necessarily, but we do are addicted to some elements scattered around the globe that support the base of the world economy and that we need, like water, so that everything remains in order. The shortage of silicon chips is already one of the most suffocating problems that humanity has to face these days, we tell you about it in this article.

A new world problem: shortage of silicon chips

Perhaps there were some smart people who knew it before, but, for the rest of the mortals, it was in 2021 when the crude dependence that the technology industry has on factories that produce microchips was revealed. Yes, those little things are absolutely essential for the operation of electronic devices.

You can now start trembling with fear, the shortage of semiconductors, of silicon chips, which work as the heads of computing devices, is not good for us. Because, as you may tell, they control everything these days, from your smartphone to your laptop, from your tablet to your new car, from your state-of-the-art washing machine to your kid’s Playstation 5.

What is this semiconductor crisis about?

As it happened with the rest of the markets, the restrictions imposed by the pandemic forced the closure of many of the factories that were devoted to the production of these chips, thus making their production more difficult. And what’s worse, on top of that, the demand for computer devices increased, since everyone was locked up at home, needing to work remotely or entertain themselves with screens so as not to die of disgust making bread or staring at the wall. To all of this we add the inevitable delay in shipments and transport on a global scale, as well as the rise in the price of silicon, an essential element for microchip manufacturing, and other components that were bitterly disputed by the great world powers. As if that were not enough, two large chip producers, Taiwan and China, suffered certain catastrophes that seriously affected the capacity of their factories.

We know that the semiconductor industry fluctuates, that it is fickle and regularly goes through certain cycles of shortage, but all of this happened at the same time: this fluctuating nature, the alteration of demand and supply patterns due to the pandemic, the disagreements between the great powers, and then the catastrophes in the countries with the highest production… Not even done on purpose!

Who has been the worst off because of the shortage?

One of the markets that has been the most affected is the automobile sector. In fact, the AlixPartners financial consultancy recalls that, due to the shortage of chips, the global automobile industry has lost, this past 2021, 210,000 million dollars in revenue. That’s about 7.7 million cars less.

But not only that, the shortage of semiconductors also threatened the availability of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets with microchips in the last months of last year, which is, as you know, when these things are sold more. The Christmas campaign.

In fact, the very Apple, during November, had to choose between its iPads and its iPhones, diverting the chips that were originally destined for the former for the latter, since the iPhones are sold more and they are more lucrative. This meant that many specialist stores in the UK didn’t have stock of the iPad mini or the basic iPad for months.

But now comes perhaps the sector that has defended the problem of silicon, chips, semiconductors and all their ancestors the most: the world of gamers. Because the universe can be sunk with a single click of Thanos but the difficulties to get the brand new PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series X is inexcusable. Indeed, Sony had it hard. Forced, even, to stop the production of its flagship product, the PS5, because the hundreds of chips that make it up are too difficult to obtain. The same thing happened with the giant Nintendo, which warned, distressed, that they were in serious trouble. They couldn’t keep up with the demand for their new console. Meanwhile, high-end graphics cards for PC gaming are still hard to find. If things continue like this, at any moment gaming lovers will leave the controls of Call of Duty, come out of their burrow and go themselves refine the silicon.

Moving on to the aesthetic spectrum, we note that if you’re bald you might not have noticed, but the Supersonic hair dryer and Airwrap hair styler have been missing for months as tech giant Dyson continues to beg for chips among the few supplies that work selling them worldwide.

Conclusion: What will happen in the near future?

Yes, things are very bad regarding the supply of chips and semiconductor materials. Although, don’t worry, experts warn that the effects of the shortage will only take a year to subside. There will be gradual improvements, although all the demand will probably not be met before 2023.

Many companies, such as Intel, have decided to create new chip factories in Europe, America and Asia to avoid another shortage on such a scale. In the meantime, meditate, exercise, read our articles, check your security system, or try to bring back tug-of-war as an Olympic sport.

Hard disk types: Get to know the main ones!

Do you need to buy hard disks? All right, we all have needs in life.

Are you clear about what you need them for? Great, that’s where it starts.

Don’t you have a clear choice of hard disk types? Maybe we can give you some clues…

The choice of hard disks depends, specially, on the use you are going to make of them. You may need them for servers or databases, or for high-performance environments. But it is also possible that you only want them to save on your home computer Petabytes of videos of the dancing parrot.

In this article we are going to know the main types of hard disk that exist nowadays. Let’s go!

Hard disk types. A brief introduction

Before going into greater depths we have to say that hard disks are basically divided into 2 categories: HDD and SSD.

When distinguishing between classes of hard disks, these can also be distinguished depending on the type of connectors they use. Thus, we talk about modalities such as SATA, SCSI or SAS, among others.

In fact, we could even use other criteria to classify the types of hard disk, such as where they are (internal or external) or even what they are used for, but in this article we are going to keep the first two.

Next we will see what each type of hard disk consists of. However, one thing to keep in mind is that both HDDs and SSDs will be able to use different types of connectors.

Hard Disk Types: HDD and SSD

HDD Hard Disks

We know by HDD (Hard Drive Disk) the traditional mechanical hard disks that record information magnetically on one or several platters. HDDs are made up of mechanical parts; they basically consist of one or more hard disks that rotate at high speed (thousands of RPMs) around an axle, inside a box. On each disc, a head reads or records data on each of its faces.

So that you can visualize it simply, it would be something like a small turntable stored inside a box (saving distances).

HDDs have been the most widely used discs in recent decades. More economical, durable, and with ever-increasing storage capacities, HDDs have reigned as storage devices for decades, and even though they have been a tough competitor in SSDs, they are still widely accepted.

Solid State Disks (SSD)

They are a recent novelty, and every day they have more followers. Actually, when we talk about SSD (Solid State Drive), we’re not talking about a “hard drive” as such. However, since they share their primary purpose, which is to store data, they are also often called “hard drives”.

The structure of SSD devices has little or nothing to do with the classic HDD, so they are only called “hard drives” because they are dedicated to similar functions. SSDs are not, in fact, disks, and lack mechanical parts; on the contrary, they have their own microprocessor (called a “controller”) that takes care of data reading/writing tasks, and stores the data in microchips that have interconnected flash memories.

For the last few years SSD hard drives have been very successful thanks to their higher speed. However, they also have some disadvantages, such as their price and lower storage capacity. So some people go for the solution of using an SSD hard drive to run the operating system and use an HDD for data storage.

Types of hard disk according to their connectors

Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks

In its different versions, the most current is version III, these are the most common hard drives in home computers, if you are accessing this article through a laptop or desktop computer is likely to be the type of hard drive that is working in your computer.

The Serial ATA uses a serial connector for data transmission and in its version III reaches speeds of about 600 Mb/s.

As we said, these are the hard drive connectors that have been most popular in recent years. Both their price and their data transmission speed have made them very popular.

SCSI or SAS hard disks

These are professional hard drive connectors that are typically found in high performance environments.

They are usually installed in RAID and are inside racks or blades.

One of their main features is that they are able to replace other similar hard disks (which, for example, have broken down), without having to shut down the computer, which will help the service to continue operating without an interruption.

Let’s get monitoring!

And now that we’ve seen some of the main hard disk types out there, how about taking a few minutes to discover something as important as system monitoring?

Monitoring systems are responsible for monitoring computer systems (hardware, networks and communications, operating systems or applications, for example) in order to analyse their operation and performance, and to detect and warn of possible errors.

And if we talk about monitoring, of course, we should talk about Pandora FMS. Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring software, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can monitor are the hard disks of your computers.