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