All About Hard Drives

Carl Shank • September 13, 2022

All About Hard Drives. A Primer. What is a hard drive and why do you need it? In every computer there is a storage space, called a hard drive. The main hard drive of your computer stores the operating system for your computer as well as files of data, photos, videos, and other work and play and home files. Most drives have matured over the years through technology, by getting smaller, lighter, more efficient and durable, in many cases, their basic operating structure has also radically changed. There are four basic hard drives — PATA (IDE) drives, SATA drives, SSD drives and NVMe drives.


PATA drive. Also known as IDE or EIDE drives, these are the older drives that used to run especially desktop computers.The initials "ATA" stand for Advanced Technology Attachment and PATA means Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment. These were mostly designed by Western Digital. Western Digital, Seagate and other familiar names are on them. They come in two sizes, a 3.5 inch drive and a 2.5 inch drive for laptops. Actually, the 3.5 inch is dimensionally, 4 x 5.75 x 1, but  the innards are 3.5 in across. The drive has a spinning platter inside with an electronic needle that moves across the platter as you are writing and reading data from your computer. It looks like a CD (remember those?) These drives have on the outside mostly a 40-pin connector with an additional 6 or 8 dual pin combination to tell the computer if the drive is a "master" or a "slave" to another drive on the computer. (See Example Below). As you can imagine, as data is written on the drive platter, the data can become scattered or "fragmented," and often for faster drive access and use, we need to "defragment" them. They are generally the slowest of all drives, reading and writing at up to 100 or 133 MB per second, which may seem fast, but is fairly slow according to modern standards. The larger the drive, the slower the access.


SATA drive. These are  the daughter of PATA drives and is what are used in most computers today. They are faster than PATA drives, and can read and write up to 16 GB per second, as contrasted with up to 133 MB per second with PATA. SATA attachment cables are also longer than the maximum 18 inch cable with PATA and therefore can be placed within the computer frame at a more convenient place. SATA offers two connection points, one to the drive and the other to the motherboard of the computer. Again, data is written to a moving platter and therefore can become fragmented over time. They are generally less expensive than the drives that followed them. SATA drives can be purchased in large storage sizes. (See Examples Below)


SSD drive. SSD stands for Solid State Drive. These drives have no moving parts and all data is stored on non-volatile memory chips. These drive can be anywhere from 120 GB to over 2 GB in size. These drives are the preferable 2.5 inch drives found in laptops and since they have no moving parts can withstand shocks much better. They are more expensive, perhaps two to four times as much as regular SATA drives. The connection is still a SATA connection to your computer. (See Examples Below)


NVMe drive. Released in 2013, NVMe drives (Non-Volatile Memory Express) are usually attached to a PCI Express (PCIe) slot on the main board of your computer. They are incredibly fast drives with read and write speeds of 32 GB per second and upwards. They are mostly used for gaming and high resolution video editing on the computer. They are very expensive and used for high end work. (See Examples Below)


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Calligraphy & Typography

By Carl Shank • September 29, 2025
Calligraphy & Typography. Calligraphy, the art of beautiful handwriting, has a long and rich history that spans cultures, religions, and centuries. It developed not only as a means of communication but also as a form of artistic expression, religious devotion, and cultural preservation. While typography is not calligraphy, with much of type carefully structured, straight-backed and neatly drawn and focused on lettering for printing readability, both art forms involve visual expression of language. Both focus on the shape, proportion and beauty of letters. Both reflect religious, historical and cultural influences on writing styles. Both are used for artistic and decorative purposes in design, and much of type has been greatly influenced by calligraphic styles. Yet, they differ significantly in their methods, purposes and tools. Calligraphy is the art of hand drawn, beautiful writing, while typography focuses on the design and arrangement of type letters for print or digital use. Calligraphy is created manually with pens, brushes, or quills, while type is created digitally or mechanically using typefaces. Traditional tools used in calligraphy include dip pens, brushes and ink, while type is formed with digital or physical lettering. Calligraphy is highly expressive and free flowing, while type is usually uniform and consistent across all characters. Calligraphy is usually done for decorative and personal use, while typography is often constructed and used for mass communication in books, websites and signage. Mediums for calligraphy include paper, parchment, walls, while typography focuses on print and digital media. Yet, the roots of much of type comes from the wealth of history and styling offered by calligraphy. CARE Typography has been able with Font Lab's tools like Fontographer, to translate fine calligraphy into usable typefaces, even for the modern market tastes. The fine art of calligraphy is highlighted in the background to this post in the 2018 calligraphic rendering of the Scripture, "Well done, good and faithful servant" (Matthew 25:25a) by Calligraphy for Christ ( https://www.calligraphyforchrist.com/ ). Such beautiful religious typographic pieces actually begin not with the Gutenberg era in 1450 but with the ancient Chinese.

Early German Typography (Part 2)

By Carl Shank • September 22, 2025
Herbert Hoffmann, Albert Bruckner, Max Hertwig, and Rudolf Koch collaborated on a typographic “atlas” or specimen book titled Hoffmanns Schriftatlas: Das Schriftschaffen der Gegenwart in Alphabeten und Anwendungen (1930) ( Hoffmann’s Type Atlas: Contemporary Type Creation in Alphabets and Applications ) Also distributed in France under the title Alphabets by Herbert Hoffman and other collaborators by Arts et Métiers Graphiques magazine, it is a specimen of alphabets, initials, monograms, logos and other typographic forms from early German typography. The atlas captures typographic modernism in Germany around that time, including influences of the Bauhaus and the modernist movement. It is considered a rich visual record of type and lettering design in that period, showing both experimental and traditional forms. In Part One of this series, we investigated the typography of early Germany through the lens of Rudolf Koch, Louis Oppenheim, E.R. Weiss, Lucian Bernhard, Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens, and Bernard Naudin. In this Part Two we revisit the typography of Ernst Deutsch, Friedrich Heinrichsen, Benjamin Krebs Nachfolger, Maria Ballé, Margarete Leins, Anna Simons and take a brief visit to the Ecole des Arts et Metiers in Stuttgart.
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