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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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Sketch & Hand Drawn Lettering

By Carl Shank • January 29, 2025
Sketch & Hand Drawn Lettering. The history of font development includes a wealth of calligraphic fonts and artistically crafted hand drawn typefaces. A number of these lettering fonts have been drawn and submitted by smaller type foundries and entrepreneurs seeking to make their mark in the font world. A casual look at ChatGPT gives some idea as to their source and character. Fonts that mimic pencil drawings often have a hand-sketched, textured, or rough-lined appearance. These fonts are great for artistic projects, children's books, casual branding, or creative typography. The sample fonts below are mostly given for personal use only, use on personal invitations and so forth, but some have been made available for commercial use as well. They demonstrate the wide range of hand drawn fonts available for use and purchase.

Four Old Playful Fancy Fonts

By Carl Shank • January 20, 2025
Four Old Playful Fancy Fonts . CARE Typography is pleased in its historical search for antique inspired fonts to introduce digitized versions of Harper and Mikado, a Gutenberg typeface and Lacrosse. Unlike their modern counterparts, these fonts are display only fanciful fonts of a bygone era in typography. However, they exude a rich history of font development that should not be forgotten in our search for the new, the sleek, the up-to-date in type. They have been developed from the rich typographic heritage of Phillips Old Fashioned Type Book published in 1945 by Frederick Nelson Phillips, Inc, in New York. This volume has caught my historic typographic eye for its plethora of ancient font styles and formulations. The Harper446 font is especially playful, with its curly capitals, its specialized "Q" capital and, of course, its flavorful and playful small case lettering, with the raised c, e and o letters and the odd looking "g." This is obviously not a text font, but can uses in artful decorative work. The Mikado231 font does not at all look like the variations of the typeface called "Mikado" in typography history. As that history notes, "Mikado was apparently inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera of the same name. The show opened in London in March of 1885 and in New York later that same year. According to Nicolete Gray in her classic book on ornamented typefaces, the English foundry of Sir Charles Reed and Son introduced a metal type called “Japanese” also in 1885. She characterized this typeface and other oriental based typefaces as superficial in their foreign influence. Nonetheless it appears that it was later copied by several of the American Wood-type companies. The 1906 Hamilton wood-type specimen catalog shows four versions of this design; one by Hamilton and three by acquired companies. The versions by Wells, and Morgans & Wilcox are called Mikado. The Hamilton and Page versions use model numbers 204 and 156 respectively. It is difficult to determine the specific dates when this particular wood-type was introduced, but the earliest wood-type catalog I could find showing Mikado is the 1888 Page catalog. Our sample “WINTER” is a 15 line unstamped type most similar to the Hamilton version. Incidentally, another English foundry, Miller and Richard introduced a metal typeface in 1887, also named Mikado. That typeface is totally different than the one presented here." (https://www.printmuseum.org/wood-type-mikado). This Mikado adaptation has straight angular E, F, G, K, T and even raised W, X, Y in the capitals. Note the falling stems of C, L, and lower c, e, h, m and n. Again, this playful font can be used sparingly in advertisement copy and flavorful playbills. The Gutenberg700 font is again from the Phillips book samples. Note the dotted C, U, V, small g and zero. The ampersand is also interesting. Curly serifs are used in A, J, L, S. The numerals are classic old school numerals. This Gutenberg rendering is unlike any classic Gutenberg typeface that has been presented. The LacrossePhillips font has a cute left hanging serif on the capitals. It is a bold faced font, both in the upper and lower case. It is a full font offering upper and lower case lettering, numerals and other marks. These fonts are available from CARE Typography at care typography.com at NO COST. They are free to purchase and use.
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