Buying And Installing Internal Hard Drives

A larger hard drive is always welcome in any machine. But simply moving from a 40Gb to a 120Gb hard drive may not always be the best option. Look to get as much hard drive space as possible. Before you know it, that “huge” hard drive you just bought will start looking pretty small. So, if possible, buy even larger than you can imagine needing. Newer applications, including the new Windows Vista operating system will require more drive space than you can probably imagine.

The size of hard drive is known as capacity and is typically measured in gigabytes, although some drives in the terabyte range are already appearing on the market.

The second most important aspect when purchasing a new hard drive is speed. The speeds of drives vary wildly, so reading reviews, tests, and buyers guides can be very helpful.

There are two primary measurements of speed on a hard drive: average seek time and throughput. Average seek time indicates how fast, on average, the drive can access a particular area on the disks contained in its unit. Smaller times indicate better performance. Average seek times of four to eight milliseconds are now common.

The second speed factor for hard drives is throughput. Throughput is the maximum amount of data that the drive can pipe through its hardware. This is usually measured by the amount of megabytes per second the hard drive can send to the computer. This factor can be greatly enhanced by a more modern interface such as a SATA which allow for 3Gb/sec throughput. If you don’t have a SATA interface on your motherboard, you can buy a PCI adapter for one, but for only a little more money, you could upgrade your motherboard to one that has a built in SATA interface.

Both speed factors are related to how fast the drive spins. Modern internal hard drives spin at 7200 rpm (rotations per minute) for desktops, and 5400 rpm for laptops, although that number is rapidly changing. Some people prefer to have smaller capacity hard drives with higher RPM. The most popular high-speed hard drive is probably the Western Digital Raptor, but it has a current maximum capacity of 150Gb.

Having a second hard drive is a great way to be more effective. Many organizations use their second hard drive as data storage, but increasingly, business and home users are setting up RAID systems with a second hard drive. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and allows for such technologies as mirroring. By automatically keeping two copies of all data on both drives, data integrity is increased (in case of a single drive’s failure) and the speed of read operations, in which the drive reads data back to the main system, is nearly doubled. The only downside is the expense and setup time, as well as the increased write time. But hard drives typically read over 100 bytes for every byte written (during average use), so the trade off for increased read time is well worth it.

If you worry about installing a new drive, don’t be. Major hard drive manufacturers Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor, all include utility software that will walk you step by step through backups, formats, and drive copies. Many other companies offer similar tools to get you started. If you can change a tire, you can easily install a new hard drive.

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