How to Select a Hard Drive

Series Summary

A computer hard drive is very important. The hard drive stores a computer's information including the operating system, such as Windows, and computer programs like Microsoft Office. A slow hard drive can cause a computer with a fast CPU to run slowly because the CPU will spend time waiting for information from the hard drive. If a hard drive stops working correctly, it is possible that all data could be lost forever. Hard drives have become more reliable, but hard drives are still one of the computer's parts that are most likely to fail because hard drives are one of the few components of a computer with moving parts. In this free video series on the basics of hard drives, an experienced computer user will explain installing, reformatting, ghosting, cleaning, destroying and troubleshooting a hard drive. This series will also explain how a hard drive works, how to designate a start-up drive and how to recover hard drive data. Learn how this important piece of computer hardware works and increase the speed and reliability of a computer.

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Richard Goms, I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah. We are talking about hard drive basics. I'm going to show you right now how to select a hard drive. Now this for those who are novices is a hard drive. It belongs in your computer system and you can have up to two hard drives in your computer system. Selecting a hard drive depends on the application you are going to be using. If you are using it strictly for business then you probably get by with a smaller hard drive then if you had a, were using high density digital images, videography, storing faxes things like that. You would need more hard drive space. Now a days the cost of hard drive space has come down so low that you can get a very, very large hard drive for very little money. So you probably don't really need to skimp. Hard drives come in different sizes, eighty gigabytes now a days is so cheap that and for almost any business application eighty would be fine, then it goes up to one sixty up to three twenty up in the four hundred range, five hundred and you can even get a terabyte. Which is one of the largest hard drives that's available today. There are two different types of connections that you should be concerned about, the old style connection now is the ata, the one thirty three, the one hundred, the three hundred. Those are the old style and they're much slower then the new style of the sata. The ata is similar to this one right here, you'll see lots of pins and you'll see the connectors have a lot of wires on them. And this is the old style. The transfer rate is not as fast as the new style the sata. Now I don't have one handy but this connector here is very similar to what the sata would look like. It's got seven wires and it's got a much faster transfer rate."