What should I look for when shopping for a new hard drive?

Question

I'm going to ask Santa for a bigger, better hard drive this Christmas. What should I look for in a hard drive so I get the most bang for my buck?

Answer 1

Connection Type- EIDE, SATA 1.5, or SATA 3. Which do you have?
Size- How much space you need to have?
Buffer- How big is the memory buffer
Rotations- The higher, the faster it retrieves data, and the more heat it generates.
RAID- Going to keep your other one? If so do you have enough slots ready?
Brand- Is it a trusted brand. This isnt very important, but some have a better reputation

Answer 2

Know your Motherboard and your case.

There are two types of HDD on the market.

IDE or ATA type is the more common type as it's been around for years, and your Computer Should work it, as CD's and DVD Drives use this too. Most PC's Can only handle 4 drives of this type. 2 on each lead. It does need a some knowledge of computer to install.

SATA, is newer and significantly faster, but you'd only notice if you're transferring big files between SATA drives. Because it is a new technology, not a lot of Motherboards support it.

Most Hard disks are 3inches or a Floppy disk size. You can get some 5in/CD Disks. If you got a 3 in Disk and no 3 in slots you can buy a adapter to make it fit in a 5in slot.

You can just ignore this if you're planning to buy an external Disk drive.

Answer 3

Aside from the size of the drive, probably the biggest one to consider is the interface. The older format went under several names but usually was called IDE or EIDE or P-ATA. It takes a wide, credit-card thin ribbon cable with either 40 or 80 wires in it - usually colored black or grey, with a red stripe down one side. The newer format is called SATA and has a thinner, usually red colored, wire that is as thick as a stack of 4 credit cards. You want to make sure you get an interface on the drive that matches with the one in your current computer.

For size, the "sweet spot" on the pricing vs. capacity curve is in around the 300-500GB range. Above 500GB prices start to rise rapidly.. but you get more space.

For speed, nearly all desktop hard drives - except for the rather expensive Western Digital Raptors - are 7200rpm and they generally have similar performance characteristics.

Beyond that, the size of the cache is important. More is better - so 16MB is better than 8MB.

Lastly, the warranty is important. Since hard disks are one of the few components that are likely to wear out in a computer, the warranty on the hard disk is one of the few that you are ever likely to use. Warranties vary from 1 year to 5 years.

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