Buying Guide - The Hard Drive
A hard drive is the primary storage device for all of your files. Adding a second (or third, etc.) hard drive is like adding another room to your home - it creates more storage space. The connection to the motherboard (IDE or Serial-ATA) is like how big the doorway is. Using IDE, it's pretty much a standard bedroom door, but using SerialATA, you might think of it as having French doors - double wide. To take it a step farther, the speed at which the hard drive can spin is (vaguely) somewhat like how fast you can find things in that room (the more rpm's mean it's faster). Keep these three things in mind when choosing a hard drive: Capacity, Connection, and Speed. CapacityThe size of hard drive you need relies heavily on what you do with your computer. If it is simply a word-processing, internet-accessing workstation, 40-80GB should do just fine. For the intermediate user with digital music or photos, 200-500GB should be more in the ballpark. For the advanced user working with video, tons of large files, or having an enormous digital music or video collection, think in the 500GB+ range. ConnectionSerial-ATA has quickly become the industry standard for data transfer. The cables support transfer speeds up to twice as fast as the older IDE connection, and, as an added bonus, they're easier to plug in. If your motherboard supports it, SerialATA is the way to go. If you're buying a new motherboard, require at least 2 SerialATA ports to take advantage of this technology. There are currently two types of SerialATA on the market SATA-I (SATA-150, SATA 1.5gb/s) and SATA-II (SATA-300, SATA 3.0gb/s). Currently, the bottleneck is not with the transfer speed, so SATA-II doesn't even provide a noticeable edge on SATA-I. SATA-II is the new standard, so, given the choice, I would ensure that anything I bought was SATA-II compatible. SpeedIDE comes in 2 speeds: 5400rpm and 7200rpm. 7200rpm is pretty standard across the board, and you would notice a drop in performance by using a 5400rpm drive. SerialATA comes in 2 speeds: 7200rpm and 10,000rpm. Obviously the latter will have a quicker access time, but it can be up to 3 times more expensive than its 7200rpm counterpart, and a bit noisier as well. For now, I would stick with the 7200rpm drive for a convenient mix between performance and price unless you're building a high-performance machine. What's a RAID array? How does it work?RAID stands for 'Redundant Array of Independent Disks.' RAID arrays come in a few different flavors that serve different functions. For quick reading/writing to the hard drive, RAID 0 uses a process called "striping," which alternates which hard drive each consecutive bit of data is stored in. For backing up data, RAID 1 uses "mirroring" to essentially write the same thing to both hard drives involved. In both cases, at least 2 hard drives are involved, making this a potentially expensive project. There are other combinations of configurations that perform both functions but require 3 or 4 hard drives. This can be quite an expense for a home computer. For the most part, there will be no noticeable difference between a striped RAID array and a SerialATA hard drive under light use. Medium to heavy users will experience a slight difference in performance, especially when copying files and doing program installations. If you really want the boost in performance, I recommend using Serial-ATA hard drives in your RAID instead of the hot, noisy, expensive SCSI hard drives or the slower interface of the IDE drives. Check your motherboard for compatibility before beginning, or you might need a PCI card or additional software to run the array for you.
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