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Selecting The Best New Computer Hard Drive
How To!
How To - Selecting a new Computer Hard Drive:
By Raymond Garcia - WebTechGeek.com
Selecting a new Hard Drive, How To: The Hard Drive is where the computer stores
your operating system, programs, and data. If you use
your computer to edit music files, movies files, play
the latest video games, them a bigger, faster, and more
reliable hard drive will dramatically improve your computing
experience.
When considering a new or replacement hard
drive, you must consider both hard drive capacity and
speed. Computer storage technology is improving and the
hard drives get bigger and the prices are lower. You can
probably buy a hard drive that is twice as large as a
hard drive that you purchased last year for the same amount
of money or less.
Your hard drive contains so much of your
valuable data and if it crashes, its very hard to recover
that data. So pick a good reliable hard drive brand and
don't just go with the lowest price.
The bigger the hard drive, the more important
that it be fast; your computer can slow as it searches
and searches to find the data you're working on. Remember
to come back to WebTechGeek.com for more computer help
and how to's.
Here are few tip to help you!
Tips:
1. You should make sure there's space
in the case for another drive. Most desktop PC cases have
at least one, and sometimes several spaces, internal drive
bays--places where you can mount extra hard drives. But
check your manual and open up the case. Some of the smaller
low-profile computer cases don't have room for additional
internal hard drives, so you won't be able to use both
the your old and a new drive in the same computer case.
In which case you will need to buy an external hard drive.
2. You should consider
as a rule of thumb, select a new hard drive that holds
at least 100 gigabytes (GB) of data price about $99. The
Bigger the better!
3. You should consider
buying a hard drive with a fast rotational speed of 7,200
revolutions per minute (rpm) or higher. You should expect
to spend less for a slower 5,400-rpm hard drive.
4. Take a look at your
computer, you should see how much space you're using on
your current hard drive. Buy a new hard drive that allows
considerable room for programs you'll add and files you'll
save.
5. Remember that digital
photos, MP3, music and video files, as well as applications
and games, take the most room on your hard drive. Text
and word files take up hardly any room.
6. You should look for
an average seek time of fewer than 12 milliseconds (ms),
and a data transfer rate of at least 15 megabytes (MB)
per second. The actual sustained speed of the drive will
be less than the maximum "burst" speed.
7. Buffer 8MB or better:
When a system requests data, a hard drive will not only
fetch what is requested, but it will also load its buffer
memory with extra information that the processor is likely
to ask for next. While a 2MB buffer is good, that's plenty
of room to keep the data flowing, I found that drives
with 8MB performed is best! for disk-intensive tasks.
8. Oversize your hard drive:
It's a good idea to buy a hard drive with more capacity
than you think you'll need. If you're using multimedia-intensive
applications such as editing video, digital photos and
MP3's that eat up huge amounts of space, you will need
a largest-capacity hard drive. You need to anticipate
your future needs when deciding on the size of your new
drive, especially if you plan to keep your existing computer
for a few more years.
9. Bargains and Rebates. The
competition among hard drive sellers and makers is intense,
and there are often sales and rebates running all the
time. Look and compare hard drive prices and size before
you buy. Also buy from a known seller with a good return
or exchange policy in case of unexpected problems.
10. The Brand: There are
many hard drive manufacturers for you to choose from.
I have had great experience with Maxtor, IBM and Western
Digital’s drives, they run extremely well and are
very reliable.
11. External Hard Drives.
External drives is a good idea if you need to lock up
important data or you need to transport a lot of data
to another PC. Note external hard drives cost quite a
bit more than internal drives and usually require an FireWire
or USB 2.0 interface.
Note: IDE/ATA and SCSI
are different interfaces, or ways the drive communicates
with your computer's processor. Macintosh owners can use
products such as Hard Disk Toolkit to format, partition,
and customize drives (hard drives and removable media)
through a simple graphic user interface.
Tip: Look for a good
warranty about 2 or 3 years, and a Toll-Free
service and support. Remember to come back to WebTechGeek.com
for more How to's.
Price Tip: Looking for
a new hard drive, use www.pricewatch.com
or www.pricegrabber.com
to help in the process.
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