How To Choose A New Hard Drive For Your Computer.

If you are running out of space on your computer or find that

programs load a little slow, or that big files take a long

time to open, it may be time for a new hard drive.

Making a more careful decision about the hard drive can mean

a much longer working life for the hard drive. Better

reliability, allowing the hard drive to run for many years

without mechanical failures or the worst of all, losing your

precious data to errors on the drive.

Obviously the main thing that people think about when getting

a new drive is size. Although a 400GB drive sounds great,

there are very few people who actually use this much space.

Only if you save DVD movies to your hard drive, or if you do

serious amounts of video editing will you need this much space.

The smallest size drives available today are about 40GB and

will suffice for all your needs. However if you want the

latest technologies, bigger sizes are inevitable.

Over the years the speed at which hard drives work has

increased. One of the main technologies to improve is the

connection between the hard drive and the rest of the

computer. It passes the information back and forth from the

hard drive, the faster it is the faster information can be

passed, and so speeding up the programs you use and the files

you use.

There are 2 main varieties for this connection:

The old IDE kind, which comes in 4 flavors: ATA33, ATA66,

ATA100 and ATA133, each number corresponding to the transfer

rate in MB/s, the bigger the faster. This type is pretty

standard. If your computer is older, you may only be able to

use this kind, and depending how old will determine which speed.

SATA is a newer kind. It uses a different cable and allows

much faster information transfer. The slower kind is 150MB/s

and the faster is 300MB/s, so they are much faster than IDE.

A newer technology called Native Command Queuing (NCQ) speeds

up how fast things are found and done on the hard drive. Just

briefly, it orders the read and write commands given to it in

such as way as to get the tasks done quicker and with less delay.

Drives are most often separated by their size and this is

a big factor in the pricing of a drive. The smallest drives

today are around 40GB, you can get a little smaller, but no

point really. The largest of 400GB will be enough for

a really long time.

The other thing that affects pricing is the rotation speed,

which is the speed at which the big disk spins inside the

disk drive. The faster it spins the faster information gets

found. Look for rotation speeds of 7200RPM as standard and

10000 for the fast end.

With all of this it may be hard to decide, but here are my

suggestions.

For a main drive, which has your Windows and programs on it,

go for something faster, but bear in mind that even for me

my ATA66 drive is fast enough for my uses. But a faster one

will speed up how fast your programs go. It might be a good

idea just to go for one big, fast drive.

Brand name drives are often worth getting, as manufacturers

like Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital are well known for

long lasting quality products, which will not make any

difference in the short term usually, but will pay off with

long life and reliability.

If you want or need two drives the second one can sacrifice

speed for size, as thats whats most often needed for a

second drive, which usually stores all your information.

You should now have enough to make a smart choice in your

next hard drive purchase. A good one can be kept for a very

long time and minimize any hassles in the future.