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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Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase”

By Carl Shank • June 13, 2026
Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase” Carl Shank, CARE Typography Most everyone knows what “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters are. They refer, of course, to our “capital” letters and our “regular” small print. But not many know why or how they came to be known by such terminology. The answer is found in the history and development of typography and printing. “Case” here doesn’t refer to “circumstance” or “condition.” It refers to the wooden trays used to store metal letters, the top case for capital letters (“uppercase”) and the lower case for small letters. Each tray was divided into compartments to hold the type. The lower case also held the punctuation marks and other pieces of type, like “spacers.” The type case was a shallow wooden tray divided into compartments of various sizes. There were about thirty styles of type cases, and some of these were made in different sizes.[1] The most common, or standard, size was 32¼ by 16 inches, outside dimensions, and ⅛ inches deep, inside. One of three traditional plans or schemes for such type cases involved (1) all characters in one case; (2) capitals, small capitals and a few other characters in one case; or (3) the small letters, figures, points, spaces and quads in another case. The two latter cases formed a pair and would nearly always be used together.(See Images) Hand compositors (or “swifts”) would take individual letters, spaces and punctuation marks or other characters from the type case and place them in what was called a composing “stick” in such a manner that when the type characters are properly assembled, they form words, sentences and paragraphs. The work of the press room compositor was divided into two fundamental operations — the “setting” of type and the “unsetting” of type. The former was called composition and the latter, distribution. A visual example of such typesetting can be seen in some of the episodes of The Waltons, an American historical dramatelevision series about a family in rural western Virginia in the Appalachian/Blue Ridge mountains chain, during the economic hardships and mass unemployment of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the subsequent United State home front during World War II in the 1940s. The series aired from 1972 to 1981. John-Boy, a leading character of the series, opened a print shop in a shed by the family home with an old-fashioned mechanical printer that required setting cold metal type from a type case. His brother was the compositor while John-Boy ran the printing machine.

Vanity Type

By Carl Shank • June 6, 2026
Reading through an old volume of Frederick Nelson Phillips, Inc, Type Faces:With Which We 'Prove It With Proofs' in Typography for Advertisements (New York, 1924), I came across some type that falls outside of the standard typography models, called "vanity type." The term “vanity typography” is not a formal category in typographic history like Old Style, Transitional, Modern, or Sans Serif. Designers typically use the phrase informally to describe typography that draws attention primarily to itself rather than serving the text or reader. Vanity typography occurs when type is used as a display of the designer's skill, fashion, or personal taste rather than to improve communication. Readability is sometimes sacrificed for self-expression and artistic flair. Such type styles use excessive ornamentation, decorative letterforms, overuse of effects like shadows, outlines, gradients and distortions, unusual spacing, and generally typography used to impress rather than inform. Notice in the sample by Phillips, the different "A's," "F's,", "G's," "H's," "L's," "M's," "S's," T's" and "W's." This is not calligraphy lettering, but rather type that could have been used for verses or opening letters to paragraphs or stories.
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