The hard drive is an important part of the modern personal computer. Its volume determines the amount of information that you can store on it, and reliability affects the safety of data. Choosing a hard drive is a responsible task.
Decide on the interface
You can find both IDE drives and SATA drives on sale. Which option should you choose? The IDE is an outdated interface today. In 2003, it was replaced by SATA. The new standard enables faster data transfer rates. An IDE disk should only be purchased if your computer is about ten years old and lacks full SATA support.
Today, discs with updated versions of the SATA interface - the second and third revisions have appeared on sale. What to choose? In theory, SATA 3 is twice as fast as its predecessor. But in fact, there is no difference in data transfer speed, because a classic hard disk using magnetic platters cannot work at that speed.
Volume selection
Choose a hard drive so that it best suits your needs. The first place when buying a hard drive is often put volume. Usually, buyers start with a simple principle - the more, the better.
In many ways, this approach is justified. Today's games and movies in HD resolution can quickly fill up even a large storage device. In addition, the larger the hard drive, the cheaper one gigabyte is. One 2TB drive will cost about 30% less than two 1TB drives.
But if you want to buy a hard drive with a volume of more than 2.2 terabytes, remember that it will not be able to work fully in every computer. First, your motherboard must support working with such drives, both at the software level (BIOS) and at the hardware level (controller). Secondly, not all versions of operating systems support such disks. A 64-bit OS is required for normal operation, starting with Windows Vista.
Operational speed and reliability
The performance of the entire system depends on the speed of your hard disk. It affects the speed of loading the operating system, launching applications, opening large files.
One of the key factors affecting the speed of the hard drive is the spindle rotation speed. It is measured in rpm. For home and office use, there are two types of drives available - operating at 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm.
If you plan to install an operating system and programs on your disk, choose an HDD with a 7200 rpm engine. In the case of using a hard drive for storing files, it is better to choose a slower model. The fact is that such disks are less noisy, almost do not heat up and consume less energy.
If you want to significantly speed up your computer, you can opt not on conventional hard drives using magnetic platters, but on solid state drives (SSD). They use flash memory, are completely silent and provide high speed. Due to the absence of moving parts, they are not afraid of mechanical stress.
They also have disadvantages. They are much more expensive than classic hard drives. The SSD is limited to a certain number of write cycles, after which the drive becomes unusable. In fairness, it should be noted that manufacturers are working to eliminate this shortcoming and have achieved some success.
Hybrid hard drives have recently been on the market. These are platter drives that use several gigabytes of flash memory as a buffer in which the most frequently used files are cached. This is a compromise between SSD and HDD. They work faster than conventional hard drives, while being significantly cheaper than solid-state drives.
What are the most reliable drives? Any manufacturer has both good and bad models. It takes some time to identify problems. Therefore, do not rush to purchase a new model at the time of its launch on the market. It is better to wait a few months and read the reviews of the owners. If you do not have the opportunity to wait so long, it is worth staying on a model that has already managed to establish itself positively.
