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

If you need to replace or upgrade your hard drive areconnectors but can only run device per connector but
some tips you need to know before you break outat a much faster speed. Speaking of which...
your wallet..."I feel the need for speed!"
Your hard drive is fading into the West. You hear allThe first thing you should find out when looking at a
manner of grinding sounds coming from it and it'snew hard drive is its rotational speed or RPMs
working slower than an accountant doing an audit. So(revolutions per minute). The higher the RPM rating a
you grab your wallet and bounce down to the localdrive has, the faster it will work when in operation.
electronics store to find a replacement.Speed = better performance for both the Windows
Whoa! You get inside and are dazzled and dazed byoperating system and other software programs. The
the sheer number of hard disks...you didn't think it wouldaverage RPM for a hard drive is either 5400 or 7200.
be this difficult.Seek Times. Occasionally you may hear some big
All you want is something affordable and reliable buttime technical person mention the "seek times" for a
where to start?drive. Seek times are measured in milliseconds and are
Performance vs. Capacitybasically a gauge of how rapidly a software program
When you are out shopping for a new drive these arecan locate the data it requires on a given hard drive.
the two main factors you should take intoAccess times and seek times for our purposes are
consideration. Performance is based on a computer'sthe same. Most modern home computers have a
drive controllers (connector types), the rotational speedseek time of about 8ms. So a new drive with a seek
and access times of the drive itself.time of 9ms is considered a bit slow.
Capacity is basically a question of storage space andSo when looking at speed find the highest RPM
whether or not your current system can recognizematched with the lowest or average seek time.
and handle it or not.Bigger is Better?
Know your connector typeThe next thing you should look at is a device's size or
Modern computers can have several different stylesstorage space. You ideally should get as big of a drive
of controller interfaces (connector types) and this willas you can afford. Hard drive capacity is measured in
greatly determine what kind of drive you can fix into"megabytes" (million byte size: very old drives),
your machine."gigabytes" (billion byte size: current drives), and the
The current standard is the IDE or ATA drive. ATAvery newest are "terabyte" drives (trillion byte size).
drives can have ATA/66, ATA/100 or ATA/133Like in a house, you can never have "too much"
connections. Every ATA slot can operate 2 separatestorage room!
devices (2 hard drives, 1 drive/CD or CD/DVD).So now you know to get a drive with...
The newest drives have SATA (Serial ATA)