What Is the Best Computer Hard Drive?

Series Summary

Computers are complex machines built upon very simple principles. They perform arithmetical operations millions of times over to transform digital information moving at lightning speed into usable human data. A personal computer's job is to help a user create, manipulate, deliver, receive or delete media content. This is a simple, sterile definition that sounds uninteresting on the surface. Nevertheless, these fundamental functions mimic human ability in some surprising ways. Therefore, the computer is increasingly becoming an engine of the imagination, a platform for the digital life. In this free video series on computers, a certified computer technician discusses a few things about laptops and personal computers. Discover the main differences between PCs and Macintosh computers, and get tips on identifying hard drives, graphics cards and DC converters. Understand the different components of computers and laptops to use them more efficiently.

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network For Success, and today we're going to talk about, "What Is the Best Hard Drive?" There are many different types of hard drives, and they all do the same thing, which is to store information on your computer. Hard drives are typically large, although in laptops they are small. So today I'm going to show you what I think is the best hard drive according to industry standards. Now, how would we rate the best hard drive? Well, some of the things we'd be looking for are, how much does it cost? How long does it last before it fails, or the mean time between failures, MTBF. How hot does it run? How much data does it store, and how fast does it store that data? So those would be the things we really want to consider when we're looking at hard drives. Now there are many manufacturers of hard drives. We have companies with names like, MacStore, Western Digital, Hitachi, IBM, Seagate. So there are many companies that are producing hard drives. What is the best hard drive? Well the best hard drive is made by a company called Seagate. And the reason for this is that Seagate has had higher standards for producing hard drives than other companies. For example, they use a bearing inside of their hard drives instead of a bushing. And what's the difference? A bearing has little balls to allow whatever it's transporting to move without friction, whereas a bushing is an immovable object that has to have grease in order to allow something to slip. So, we know right off the bat that Seagate produces higher quality hard drives. Now the next question is, "Are they at a good price?" Well, everybody's very competitive nowadays, so you can get Seagate hard drives at prices that are competitive with anybody. Now let's think about the transfer rate. Well, there are standards for transfer rates, and transfer rates in hard drives are handled by a number of different standards, which we don't need to talk about at the moment because it does get very technical. But, we do need to talk about mean time between failures. And the Seagate models of hard drives last longer than other brands without problems. Seagate is a good, solid commercial company. They stand behind their product with good warranties. And, I think that anybody in the industry would tell you that Seagate offers the industry standard for hard drives. And that you can't go wrong."