Computer Repair Tips: What to Look For in a Replacement Hard Drive
Author: Chancer Reese


If you need to replace or upgrade your hard drive are some tips
you need to know before you break out your wallet...

Your hard drive is fading into the West. You hear all manner of
grinding sounds coming from it and it's working slower than an
accountant doing an audit. So you grab your wallet and bounce
down to the local electronics store to find a replacement.

Whoa! You get inside and are dazzled and dazed by the sheer
number of hard disks...you didn't think it would be this
difficult.

All you want is something affordable and reliable but where to
start?

Performance vs. Capacity

When you are out shopping for a new drive these are the two
main factors you should take into consideration. Performance is
based on a computer's drive controllers (connector types), the
rotational speed and access times of the drive itself.

Capacity is basically a question of storage space and whether
or not your current system can recognize and handle it or not.

Know your connector type

Modern computers can have several different styles of
controller interfaces (connector types) and this will greatly
determine what kind of drive you can fix into your machine.

The current standard is the IDE or ATA drive. ATA drives can
have ATA/66, ATA/100 or ATA/133 connections. Every ATA slot can
operate 2 separate devices (2 hard drives, 1 drive/CD or
CD/DVD).

The newest drives have SATA (Serial ATA) connectors but can
only run device per connector but at a much faster speed.
Speaking of which...

"I feel the need for speed!"

The first thing you should find out when looking at a new hard
drive is its rotational speed or RPMs (revolutions per minute).
The higher the RPM rating a drive has, the faster it will work
when in operation. Speed = better performance for both the
Windows operating system and other software programs. The
average RPM for a hard drive is either 5400 or 7200.

Seek Times. Occasionally you may hear some big time technical
person mention the "seek times" for a drive. Seek times are
measured in milliseconds and are basically a gauge of how
rapidly a software program can locate the data it requires on a
given hard drive.

Access times and seek times for our purposes are the same. Most
modern home computers have a seek time of about 8ms. So a new
drive with a seek time of 9ms is considered a bit slow.

So when looking at speed find the highest RPM matched with the
lowest or average seek time.

Bigger is Better?

The next thing you should look at is a device's size or storage
space. You ideally should get as big of a drive as you can
afford. Hard drive capacity is measured in "megabytes" (million
byte size: very old drives), "gigabytes" (billion byte size:
current drives), and the very newest are "terabyte" drives
(trillion byte size). Like in a house, you can never have "too
much" storage room!

So now you know to get a drive with...

- 7200 RPM
- Seek times of 8ms or lower
- With as many Gigabytes as you can afford
- Check with your PC manufacturer to be sure your new drive can
be handled by your old computer


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