Choosing the right hard drive when buying a home computer is an important step to consider. Without the proper hard drive, using your computer won’t be as much fun as you want it to be. Hard drives come in many different sizes and configurations. The latest hard drives can hold anywhere from 80GB to 1TB. When buying a hard drive, size isn’t the only factor to look at. By choosing the right hard drive for your needs, you’ll enjoy your computer more.
Hard drives are inexpensive and you should never select one with less space to save money. For business or basic home use, an 80GB hard drive should be sufficient. If you plan on downloading music, movies or installing a lot of games on your computer, your hard drive should be at least 160 GB. For laptop users, the same space requirements apply. However if you want to stick to the hard drive that came with the desktop or laptop, you can consider buying an external hard drive.
Considering the speed of the hard drives is most important. You can opt to have a huge hard drive, but it will be worthless if it doesn’t move data fast. To find data, hard drives have platters on spindles that spin, similar to a CD. How fast a hard drive spins, is measured in RPM (revolutions per minute). The higher a hard drive’s RPM is, the faster it will perform. Desktops always have 7200 RPM hard drives where as the hard drives in Laptops can range from 4200 RPM to 5400 RPM for normal use and 7200 RPM for high end use. Hard drives with RPMs of 10,000 or more are also available, but those are mainly for gamers, computer enthusiasts and servers.
If you are computer user looking for performance, you should know about RAID. RAID lets you put two or more hard drives of the same brand and model together and run them at once, which results in faster performance.
Hard drive’s cache is also an important performance indicator. A hard drive’s cache will hold frequently accessed data for faster access by the computer. A good hard drive will have at least 8 MB of cache.
I hope the above tips are helpful to you in choosing the right hard drive for your desktop or laptop