Do you know your USB from your Firewire? Or which is best an internal or external drive?

There are 3 reasons why you need a new hard drive, one is that your current hard drive has failed and you need a replacement. We don’t want to scare you but your internal hard drive stores data, not just pictures of holiday’s gone by and music tastes you wouldn’t want to share, but for internal drives it stores a whole lot more. Your operating system, programmes and settings are all kept on your computer’s drive.  If that drive is damaged, you could lose everything, what have you currently got on your PC, laptop or Netbook? The hard drive isn’t going to explode at any minute but you may want to think about back up. This is the second reason why, your data is precious and you may want to look into getting a second drive as back up. The third reason is simple, you just need more space!

There is a massive range of Hard Drive manufacturers from Buffalo, Freecom, Hitachi, Iomega, Seagate, LaCie and Western Digital to propriety Manufacturers like HP, Lenovo and IBM.

Do you require an external hard drive or do you want to upgrade the internal capacity of your existing desktop, laptop or Netbook?

One of the advantages of external hard drives is that no installation is required, they are plug-and-play. The smaller 2.5” models are portable and easy to carry around. They are small enough to fit in your pocket and are ideal if you are on the move.

Internal hard drives can match the capacity of the 3.5” external hard drives and do offer better speeds but do require a certain amount of know-how to install. So you need to be careful and make sure you have the right screwdriver!

 

If you want an External Drive, you have 3 choices.

·         The bigger 3.5” external hard drives, offer the largest capacities, currently up to 2TBs. However they do require an AC adapter so they are less portable that the 2.5” drives.

·         The 2.5” portable external drives have lower capacity but offer portability and do not require a power adapter. The 2.5” drives draw the required amount of power from the USB port on your laptop, desktop or netbook. Recently the capacity of the 2.5” portable drives have started to compare with 3.5” drives. Western Digital are one of the first manufactures to bring a 1TB 2.5" fully portable hard drive to the market.

·         1.8” hard drives, will become more and more popular as their capacity becomes greater and their look become more reminiscent of an iPod!

When looking at External drives, you have a choice of 2 types of connections:

·         USB (Universal Series Bus, if you really needed to know!) This is the most common connection type found. There is no setup required, just plug it in. Your desktop, laptop or netbook will recognise the additional drive and you will be able to copy and move files straight away. USB 2.0 is the standard connection however as capacities and storage requirements increase so will the need to move data more quickly.

USB 3.0 or ‘SuperSpeed USB’ offers transfer speeds of up to 130MB/s which is around 3 times more faster than the current USB 2.0. To get this speed you WILL need to have a USB 3.0 port on your desktop, laptop or netbook. Other wise you will only get USB 2.0 speed as the USB 3.0 hard drives will be backwards compatible. You will need a  USB 3.0 PCIe card to upgrade your desktop.

·         Firewire Is plug and play like USB and like USB is available in 2 speeds. Firewire 400 performs at speeds similar to USB 2.0. Firewire 800 is allot faster and is mainly found on Mac PC’s.

 

When looking at internal hard drives it is important to notice the drive speed. This is measured in RPMs (revolutions per minute). Whenever you boot up your computer, laptop or netbook, open a file or program the discs inside your hard drive will spin. The faster they spin the quicker you can read or write the data. A drive which spins at 7200 rpm will be faster than a drive which spins at 5400 rpm.

Do you know which hard drive you require to ensure compatibility on your machine? Below are a few easy to use configurators to help you find your code:

 

The size of your hard drive today is measured in gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB).

A gigabyte is 1 billion bytes and terabyte is 1 trillion bytes.

So how much can I store?

  *Contents refers to number of songs, photos, or hours of video. Contents are calculated as follows – Songs (MP3): 128 kbps bit rate using 11:1 compression ratio, 4 min/song; Digital Photos: 2.5MB per JPG photo using a 6 mega pixel camera; DVD Video:5.5 Mb/s (2.597 GB/hr) data rate; HD Video: 8.3 GB/hr recording rate for 720p or 1080i output. These examples are for illustrative purposes only. Results will vary based on file size and format, settings, features, software and other factors. One gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes. One terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes.