| If you need to replace or upgrade your hard drive are | | | | connectors but can only run device per connector but |
| some tips you need to know before you break out | | | | at 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 all | | | | The first thing you should find out when looking at a |
| manner of grinding sounds coming from it and it's | | | | new 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 local | | | | drive 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 by | | | | operating system and other software programs. The |
| the sheer number of hard disks...you didn't think it would | | | | average 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 but | | | | time technical person mention the "seek times" for a |
| where to start? | | | | drive. Seek times are measured in milliseconds and are |
| Performance vs. Capacity | | | | basically a gauge of how rapidly a software program |
| When you are out shopping for a new drive these are | | | | can locate the data it requires on a given hard drive. |
| the two main factors you should take into | | | | Access times and seek times for our purposes are |
| consideration. Performance is based on a computer's | | | | the same. Most modern home computers have a |
| drive controllers (connector types), the rotational speed | | | | seek 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 and | | | | So when looking at speed find the highest RPM |
| whether or not your current system can recognize | | | | matched with the lowest or average seek time. |
| and handle it or not. | | | | Bigger is Better? |
| Know your connector type | | | | The next thing you should look at is a device's size or |
| Modern computers can have several different styles | | | | storage space. You ideally should get as big of a drive |
| of controller interfaces (connector types) and this will | | | | as 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. ATA | | | | very newest are "terabyte" drives (trillion byte size). |
| drives can have ATA/66, ATA/100 or ATA/133 | | | | Like in a house, you can never have "too much" |
| connections. Every ATA slot can operate 2 separate | | | | storage 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) | | | | |