How to Compare Hard Drives
Choosing a hard drive can be a difficult task. Hard drives with the same capacity made by different manufacturers are generally priced similarly, making it difficult to determine whether one is better than the other, and why. Compare two different hard drives by looking at every aspect of their performance and out-of-the-box experience to decide the product that best suits your needs.
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Instructions
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Decide whether you will be purchasing an internal desktop hard drive, a notebook hard drive or an external hard drive. These types of hard drives serve very different markets, and it is possible only to directly compare hard drives of the same type.
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Compare the interface used by the drives. The choices available are Serial ATA (SATA) and Parallel ATA (generally labeled simply "ATA"). The SATA interface is more recent and allows for higher transfer speeds than the ATA interface. SATA drives are also slightly easier to install and configure. If the motherboard in your computer supports SATA hard drives, this is the interface that you should select.
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Compare the capacity of the drives. A higher-capacity drive has a greater amount of room for files and will be faster if everything else is equal.
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4
Compare the drives' cache size. A hard drive's cache memory can transfer data much more quickly than the drive's rotating platters, and a drive with more cache will be slightly faster if all else is equal.
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Determine which drive has the greater number of internal platters, if possible. This may be difficult to accomplish without finding an extensive product review. However, if two hard drives have the same capacity and one uses fewer platters, the drive with fewer platters will be significantly faster due to its "area density"--more data per platter means that more data passes under the drive's read/write heads in the same amount of time.
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Compare the drives' rotational speeds. If all else is equal, a hard drive with a higher rotational speed will offer significantly better performance. The most common rotational speeds for desktop hard drives are 7200 and 5400 RPM.
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Compare the warranties offered on the drives. Hard-drive warranties vary in length, generally from one to five years. Although a drive with a longer warranty may cost more, the extra cost is often worthwhile.
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Look for benchmark tests performed on the drives, starting with the link in the "Resources" section of this article. Benchmarks use standardized tests to directly compare drives that are internally dissimilar, giving you an easy way to tell which offers superior performance.
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