Servers & Harddrives

[tonymaclennan]

Hi,
Just curious about what the difference is between a server and a hard-drive. I know a server is much larger with much greater space than a harddrive, but are they the same.
E.g. A server is used by a webhosting company, could a hard-drive be used for a small company e.g. a 80GB HDD.

 

[computerdude2004]

A hard drive is one piece of hardware in a server or a computer. A server is the whole machine. Servers have hard drives, motherboards, video cards, processors, and all the rest of the parts. Hard drives are just one of those parts. Your computer and your server can both have large amounts of storage if you buy large enough hdd's, or multiple hdd's. Your server can also have a small amount of hdd space if you have a small hdd.

 

[Praetor]

To make things confusing, servers can also reside on harddrives (i.e., FTP server, XDCC server etc) but that is typically in the context of software

 

[Cromewell]

To make things confusing, servers can also reside on harddrives (i.e., FTP server, XDCC server etc) but that is typically in the context of software

not to get technical, but a server is any computer running some sort of server software like apache, FTP, and on and on

 

[omsairam]

Computer dictionary

www.webopedia.com

Hi,
Just curious about what the difference is between a server and a hard-drive. I know a server is much larger with much greater space than a harddrive, but are they the same.
E.g. A server is used by a webhosting company, could a hard-drive be used for a small company e.g. a 80GB HDD.

 

[tonymaclennan]

so would I be correct to assume a laptop/PC could be used as a server?

 

[Cromewell]

yes any computer can be used as a server, but generally you want a specialized system build to be a server

 

[SFR]

A hard drive is a piece of hardware that reads and writes information to a storage media. A floppy or CD or DVD is a storage media. A Hard drive is just a much larger and faster (and more expensive) storage media.


A server is a COMPUTER whose resources are shared on a network. The resources it shares could be a hard drive (to clarify: A FILE SERVER is a computer with server software that shares its hard drive with anyone on that network).


When you see the word SERVER, think of it as the computer as a whole. Every piece of hardware and software on that computer contributes to that servers JOB. Wth the above example in mind, the job of a file server is to allow others to access the hard drive on that computer. So the software on that computer (in my case Windows 2000 server) manages everyones access to the hard drive.

 

[hardeez1]

yeah i was kind of wondering about this stuff too. thanks.....