what do i need to know before replacing an internal hard drive?

Question

my hard drive no longer works and i need to install a new one. are there different kinds of hard drives that i need to know about before buying?

Answer 1

Your cables inside you computer will either be IDE or SATA. This is important you know which you have in your computer to determine which harddrive you want.
And apart from that you can chose whichever hardrive you prefer.

Answer 2

A few things to ponder:

What operating system you gonna load on it? Is it a major manufacturer and you have reload discs from them. Or maybe you just have a single licensed copy.

Two types of harddrives (HD) are IDE and SATA. Does your motherboard support one or both?

IDE comes in a few speeds from 5400 to 10000rpm (I think they go that high). Older architecture but you may not have a choice. Using an IDE as a primary HD begs the size question. If you use a large IDE as your primary HD, you'll have some degradation in performance so you want to stay away from large HD with low RPM.

SATA is new architecture, faster, bigger HD's that have no degradation in performance using a larger HD as your primary HD. SATA would be preferential if your mainboard supports SATA.

Answer 3

Check out this popular mechanics article on changing a hard drive: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/1279246.html

The very first thing you'll need to do is back up most of your data such as music, personal documents, photo's etc etc etc.

I'd get a professional do it if I were you if you're unsure what needs to be done !

Answer 4

There are different types of drives. you will need your pc make / model / cpu speed etc when you get the new one.

Answer 5

Here's a step-by-step guide that might help find your answers. http://www.pcmech.com/article/installing-a-hard-drive--step-by-step/