How to Buy a Hard drive

Every hard drive eventually fails, or crashes in the event that you need to buy a replacement here are a few great insights on what to buy.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• a budget of 0-100 dollars

1. Before you go replacing your hard drive make sure that the hard drive is actually the problem. I've tried replacing hard drives in the past only to realize later, my mother board was fried not the hard drive.
   
   To check to see if your hard drive is fried please look for my article "how to know if your hard drive is fried"

2. Hard drives come in many interfaces ATA, SATA, IDE, SCSCI, PATA etc. Its hard to choose. To make it easy for you either buy a hard drive with the same interface or go with either a PATA or SATA drive they are both backwards compatible in addition they are installed in almost all new pc's.

3. With the advent of cheaper memory you can get a pretty decent hard drive for about 100 bucks! Generally 250 gb is more than enough to run your day to day activities. If your a data pack rat, you can go 350 gb for a few bucks more. If your an average user which is probably 90% of the known world you wont ever use up all that space.

4. Speed is everything, a hard drives ability to retrieve data is directly related to the speed of the drive. Generally you will see RPM speeds on a hard drive 5200 to 7200 all the way up to 15000. Rule of thumb 7200 is a good speed for almost any home pc.

Tips & Warnings

• obviously there are many other considerations to buying a hard drive this is just a quick and dirty list of the things that are most important.

[Sidhartha]

on 10/19/2008 thanks most of the time buying hard drive articles adds to much extra stuff. Generally all I want to know is what is most important to make a quick decision.

[mynameiswolf]

on 10/18/2008 Very helpful. thanks!

[Alisiane]

on 10/17/2008 Thanks for the tips. My hard drive crashed last year and I def could have used some of this info then!