How to Choose the Right Hard Disk Drive
Downloading movies and songs, creating files, saving photos from your camera, and installing new programs on your computer is all good and well, but you need space for that. When you first find a laptop or desktop computer, you might not initially concern yourself too much with the size of your internal hard disk drive, but as time goes on and the drive fills up, you are left in a battle of deciding whether to delete files that you have, use an external disk drive, or upgrade your current hard drive to a larger capacity.
Is Upgrading the Right Way to Go?
This is down to personal choice, but it can be very difficult to delete files on a drive when they are important to you. Using an external disk drive has its advantages, but since it's a separate item, there are possibilities that it could suffer damage or misplacing. Upgrading your internal drive to a new one with a larger 2 TB capacity from a smaller GB model has its benefits:
- One-time installation: Once you install your new hard drive with an SATA II connection, you no longer need to worry about it.
- All files in one storage unit: An internal HDD can hold all of your movies, songs, photos, and files, along with program and app files.
- You can back up: You can run a weekly backup for your internal hard drive if you are worried about anything happening to your computer. You can do this through an external hard drive, so you essentially have another copy of everything important that you can keep in a safe place.
What Should You Consider Before Deciding?
- Capacity: The greater the number, the more storage you will have. While you can find smaller drives with 500 GB of storage, a 2 TB SATA II drive gives you a huge amount of storage that can last you a long time. Remember that 1 TB is equal to 1000 GB.
- Size: Hard drives come in different sizes. 3.5-inch models suit desktop computers, whereas 2.5 or 1-inch models are for laptops and other smaller products.
- RPM: The revolutions per minute (RPM) on an SATA hard drive refer to how fast the rotating platters spin. Higher numbers mean faster spinning.
- Cache space: Cache space in a hard drive refers to the temporary memory space used when transferring data. Data transfers can go faster if there is more cache space available.