HDD Hard Drive

There are different professions, hobbies and at the end also people and not all of us like to do the same stuff. That is the reason why you need to know how to choose hard disk drive that suits your needs.

To put it in something much easier to comprehend, there are people that only use computers for surfing. Then there are people that do research over the internet, write some documents and watch online movies. You will also have people that do all of what previous people do, but they also like to play games and there are some people that create graphics, websites, applications and do video editing. While all of those people do different things they all need hard drive, but every one of them needs a different kind.

As regarding your hardware you also need to be careful when choosing the correct hard drive as there are IDE or ATA and SATA operated hard drives. You may also need RAID controlled had drives or desktop hard drives. The most usual hard drives are the IDE desktop hard drives, but they are slowly replaced by the SATA ones.

So how do you know how to choose hard disk drive that suits your needs the best? Lets follow this next few steps.

Step one

Determine the type of user you are. If you are looking for internet browsing and writing documents for school, yourself or for the job, then your needs will not be big. You will not have a problem with 40GB or more hard drives as it will allow you to save a lot of documents and emails for a very long time.

If you on the other hand want to browse the internet, write documents, emails, but also to play games you should not go with a hard drive with less than 100GB. The best case for you would be to get one with 250GB as then you will be able to play few bigger games at the same time and not worry about the space.

You may be a person that creates photos in some applications like the Adobe Photoshop or Gimp or a web designer that creates many websites or you can also be a programmer that likes to create new applications. If you fit these types, then you should look at the hard drives of at least 500GB. This will be enough for some time, as you will most probably not want to lose even the tiniest parts of your work.

There is an even more demanding group of people, the video editors. While you watch the TV online and you watch movies that fit on a 700MB cd’s the video editing of those took several GigaBytes for a few minutes. This may also be the case for game programmers and especially the 3D animation builders.

Now you can find yourself what capacity of the hard disk you should go after, but if you are not limited on the budget you should purchase as bigger capacity hard drives as you can.

Step two

Now, even if you have the size you still need to know the technology, which you will need to search for. You can see this on your motherboard, with IDE cables being big flat ones, often gray and SATA have purple small connectors on the motherboard with usually red cables. After you locate them and see what you have, which may be both, but it may also be only one type you can purchase as the correct one. The best choice here would be to always go for SATA (or SATA2, etc.) if possible.

Next is the RAID and desktop hard drives. The RAID controlled hard drives are made to work non stop on the company computers and are more reliable, also bit more expensive. You should probably go for the desktop hard drives as they will provide you with everything you wish.

The most important thing with hard drives is the rpm. Look for the hard drives with more than 7200rpm or at least with as much. If you purchase any hard drive with less speed, it will not matter how fast your CPU and RAM are, it will be just slow.

There are also the internal, external and portable hard drives, but you should choose them depending on your lifestyle. The ones that were described here where the internal hard drives, but the same principles apply to all of them.