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Hard Drives...
Hard Drives are not exactly the most cutting-edge component in the whole system. People rarely say things like, "Man, Seagate just came out with a new drive and I just gotta have it".
Really, the most important thing a hard drive can have is an intangible quantity, reliability. None of us ever want to face the fact that the hard drive just crashed 2 months after buying it, taking all of your personal files with it. I've heard mixed things about Western Digital drives (but never owned one myself). I've always used Maxtor (which was bought out by Seagate) drives, which work wonderfully for me. As you can imagine, though, all makers of hard drives do not have an unblemished record, so I'm sure you could find an example of each maker's drive messing up somewhere.
You should go into purchasing a hard drive with an idea of how much space you might end up needing. Right now, I'd say a drive from 120-160 GB should easily fulfill most people's needs. I ended up with my Maxtor 160 GB drive when Circuit City happened to be running a special. I still have not even used half of the drive, but there's comfort in having the additional space.
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Serial ATA FAQ
Among the drives that I suggest for your computer, there are drives out that use a technology called Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA). The standard drives use ATA (sometimes called IDE) connections which support up to 133 Megabytes per second. The SATA innovation immediately jumped the transmission speed up to 150 MBps. This technology promises to eventually replace SCSI ("scuzzy") drives (the drives used primarily in corporate servers) with transmission speeds of up to 600 MB per second.
This technology is quite promising. There are several new formats of SATA already on the horizon, as stated in this overview of SATA. Series 2 of SATA (which supports transmission speeds of 300 MBps) is generally considered the current technology here, and should remain so for some time. Currently, though, there are many motherboards out that support SATA that are in the 'sweet spot'. The technology should be considered due to the faster transmission rates, smaller diameter cables (which means better airflow and a cooler computer, which means a longer-lasting computer), and the overall cool/first-on-the-block factor as well.
| Manufacturer | Utility | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| IBM/Hitachi | Drive Fitness Test | Checks out any problems and runs a general test on a new drive. |
| Seagate | DiscWizard | A pretty comprehensive program; it claims it will facilitate installation as it can override any BIOS problems that may occur. Seagate also has several other good utilities here too. |
| Western Digital | Data Lifeguard | Data Lifeguard is similar to the other drive utilities. |
If you, for some strange reason, are installing Windows pre-SP1, you need to consider this:
Now, installing a drive larger than 137.4 GB, there are a few more problems associated with it than other drives. Microsoft (pre-Vista) did not have the foresight to plan for the eventuality of large drives, so special steps must be enacted to enable the 48-bit standard so the full capactiy of the drive will be available. Your purchases could very well already have the updates necessary (that's why, again, you shouldn't jump into buying the newest thing available), so the operating system will be your only worry. Microsoft support shows how to enable the 48-bit standard in Windows XP and Windows 2000, among others, but there's an easier way to fix the problem: Seagate offers a utility that will change the registry for you automatically.
Here again are my complete recommendations for building a computer with a great Hard Drive at a low price!
Next - Can I Reuse My Old Hard Drive? »
Tip: If you want to prevent losing all of your data on your hard drive, you should consider buying 2 Hard Drives and a motherboard that is RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) enabled. You can configure your computer, by using a setup known as RAID 1, to make a redundant copy of your hard drive to the second drive. If the first one craps out, move your second one into the primary slot, and presto! No data loss. More info on RAID here.
