Computer Sales and Support

Buy a Computer Hard Drive

Posted on 26. Oct, 2008 by admin in Hardware

A computer hard drive is a device which stores huge amounts of information and provides the means for accessing it quickly. It is the source of all the data, programs and hardware control information in your computer system.

Reasons to Buy a Hard Drive

The following are the most common reasons to buy a new hard drive:

• To replace a failing main system hard drive
• To provide more disk storage to one’s system
• To provide a fast and capacious system backup device

Things to consider

Type of Installation

You may purchase a basic hard drive that can be put directly into your computer. It can be a replacement for your main system hard drive or it can be added as an additional drive to provide more storage for your system.

This requires some tinkering with your system but for the do it yourselfers among you it is not really that difficult. It entails connecting 2 cables: power and data and mounting the drive securely inside. Details on how to do it are provided in this article. To ease the process, you should purchase your drive with a mounting kit which provides a manual, cables and mounting hardware.

This method is the one that you would use for replacing your main hard drive or adding a permanent second drive.

There are different interfaces (ways to connect). SATA is faster than EIDE and is becoming dominant. They use different types of cables. You will need to check which type of connection your system supports.

Another means of connecting a hard drive to your system is to buy one that is packaged in a case with a USB or FireWire connector. You can either purchase it in this form or buy a raw hard drive and a separate USB case and put it together yourself to same some money.

This drive is attached to your system by plugging a USB or FireWire cable into your system and your hard drive. Generally, this connection is slower than a drive installed directly into the computer.

Addonics provides a 3rd option. They provide mobile rack that can be installed into your computer and hard drives can be plugged into it. In this way you gain the full speed advantage of an internal drive as well the portability of a USB drive.

Capacity

The main issue in hard drives is drive size. You will almost always end up using more space than you anticipated. Drives are currently available in up to 1 TB (1 terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes = 1 trillion bytes) size. The minimal size that I would recommend considering is 250 gigabytes. If you are planning on storing a lot of photos, videos or games you are best off getting the largest capacity that fits within your budget.

Speed Issues

You generally want the fastest drive that you can get. However, the fastest drives are limited in how much data they can hold and for most people the amount of storage is much more important than a speed gain.

Disk Rotational Speed – The faster a disk spins, the quicker the disk head which reads the data can get to the desired information. Drives come in 3 speeds: 5,400 rpm, 7,200 rpm and 10,000 rpm. You should avoid the 5,400 speed because the 7,200 level is faster and not much more expensive. The 10,000 rpm speed is designed for corporate servers or high speed gaming. They are more expensive and they only allow for a maximum of 300 GB per drive. The average home or small office user will not need this type of drive.

Seek Speed – This indicates how fast a drive can locate data. Those desiring the fastest results should look for a model with a seek speed of 9 ms or faster.

Buffer –  Some frequently accessed data can be kept in high speed RAM within the hard drives since transferring data from electronic memory is much faster than getting it from a mechanical device such as a hard drive. (For more information about overall system speed considerations, see my computer speed article. However, there are those that argue that this doesn’t matter much and the most important consideration is the bus (the electronic pipeline connecting the hard drive to your computer). In any case, the more RAM the merrier.

Noise

If noise is an issue for you, many manufacturers make special drives that run silently. You can ask for this when you buy one.

Brand

Brand name doesn’t matter very much among quality brands. However, be sure that your drive is a generally recognized one. Do a Google search of the brand or model that you want. Search for <brand name> problem and see if a lot of problem reports come up.

Well known brands such as Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital to name a few can generally be trusted.

Warranty and data safety

A disk warranty will cover you with a replacement drive in case a drive dies but will not cover the valuable data that you may lose. The most important safety consideration is consistent backup. The best backup system is one that you will always do or is done for you automatically by the software. Acronis (affiliate link) is a top rated backup program that is the choice of many experts. Backup issues are discussed here.

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Be sure there is adequate ventilation and keep the temperature down. Heat kills hard drives.

The Fastest Disk System

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) gets the most speed out of disk drives by making many disks work in parallel. If you want the fastest gaming system get 2 10,000 rpm SATA drives and an Adaptec RAID card and plug the card into a PCIX slot and set up a RAID 0 (disks used in parallel for speed with no data redundancy for data). Be sure to keep the system cool with multiple fans.

See Dick Correa’s interesting comments for more details on hard disk issues.

Tags: buying advice, hard drive, Hardware, RAID