How To Choose A Hard Drive


Choosing a hard drive is pretty easy. You should go with a brand name you know well, and go with a company that provides a guaranteed product, that way if the hard drive dies after you have only had it for a few months you get free replacement. Even better though would be to get a hard drive that doesn't die.

Things to look at when purchasing a new drive:

  • Brand
  • Price
  • Size (in GB)
  • Size (in inches)
  • Speed

Brand

  • Choose a good brand when picking out your hard drive, sometimes you want to balance a brand with price as you do when shopping for anything. Good brands are IBM, Toshiba, Fijutsu, Western Digital, Quantum, and others.

Price

  • Obviously you want to shop around for the lowest price on which ever drive you decide to go with. Usually the manufacturer provides all the support and customer service for the drive, so where you buy it is not as important as what you buy and what price you get it at.
Size
  • The space on the drive is of course very important. There is usually a breakpoint price for drives, meaning once you hit a certain size, right now over 13 GB, you have to pay significantly more to get to the next size. Up to that point the increments of cost are very small. Depending on your needs you should get a size of drive that fits you well. If you like to do a variety of things on your computer then you should get a larger drive, (i.e. 13GB and up) if you are only playing games then you probably won't even use 13GB unless you buy every single game that comes out. Remember you can always add hard drive space now. You could get a 13 GB drive now, and in a year or two get another one.

Size

  • You want to get a drive that can physically fit inside your system. There are two main sizes of hard disk drives. The standard size is about the size of the floppy disk drive, and the large size is the size of a CD ROM drive. Its usually better to get the smaller size, but the larger sizes tend to be cheaper. Your case should have plenty of spots (at least one) for a small standard sized drive.

Speed

  • The standard speed right now is 5600 RPMs which is a decently fast drive for most peoples needs. The next speed up is 7200 RPMs the price on these drives has come down recently and it would be a good idea to take a look at them. The fastest that I know that is really available to everyone is the 10,000 RPM drives, these drives smoke, but are much more expensive.
SUMMARY:

There are a various of drives to choose from. The standard physical size is approximately 3.5" x 1", the standard speed is 5600 RPMs and prices right now are floating between $100 and $200 for a decent drive.

RECOMMENDATION:

There is no reason to buy less than a 6 or 8 gig drive. The price difference is very minimal up to about 8 gigs and even then its not much more to get up to 13 gigs. This holds true mostly for the 5600 RPM drives. The 7200 RPM drives are a little more expensive but at this point in time I would recommend take a close look at them. If you are a gamer you shouldn't buy less than a 13 gig drive. I would probably stay away from the very large drives because you can purchase another drive later. You could also purchase a smaller 7200 or 10,000 RPM drive (although 10k RPM drives are usually SCSI)  for your C drive and then a large 5600 RPM drive for everything else.
Copyright © 1999 How To PC. All rights reserved.
Revised: October 12, 1999 .