Magoo's Wise Words
Guide to Buying a Computer

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Hard Drive

Hard drives are the storage units of the computer. They store all the files and folders that you have. There are two major features you want to look for in hard drives: speed and storage space.

Size - Storage space is the number one feature of hard drives. You can never have too much hard drive space. Even if you think you have more than enough, you will find a way to fill it. Get the biggest hard drive you can afford. The Windows XP operating system requires several Gigabytes of space on its own, so you will need at least 40 GB just to have room for your operating system and programs. If you want to keep lots of music or videos on your hard drive, you will want one considerably larger.

Speed - Speed is the next thing you have to keep in mind while shopping for a hard drive. People rarely think about the speed of their hard drive, but it can really affect your computer's performance. Hard drives are one of the slowest components in your computer and is often a bottleneck in information transfer. Hard drive speed may not affect running games or applications, but it does affect things like how fast your computer starts to how long it takes to open files or switch between applications.

Most important is the transfer speed of your hard drive. This speed has a lot to do with the type of interface. For example, ATA 100 is an ATA hard drive (which uses the IDE interface I discussed earlier) and has a transfer rate of 100 MB/s. SATA I is a Serial ATA hard drive (which uses a SATA interface) and has a transfer speed of 150 MB/s. This is the speed that your hard drive transfers information to memory. Remember that your motherboard will need the same capabilities as the hard drive in order to take full advantage of it.

The next speed you need to look for on a hard drive is the seek time. This is how long it takes your hard drive to find a particular piece of information once the processor asks for it. Seek time is not as important as transfer speed, but should still be taken into consideration. Look for something with 8ms seek time or below.

Most hard drives come with a cache. The cache stores information temporarily to help speed of the transfer of information. The bigger the cache, the better. Look for at least an 8MB cache.

Bearings - Modern drives have a new technology that extends the life of hard drives and allows them to operate quietly. Different manufacturers call this different things, but its usually something like "Fluid Dynamic Bearings". This is really a great feature if you are going to leave your computer on for extended periods, especially if it is near where you sleep.

Next =>[Magoo's Guide to Computer Shopping- Page 6, Memory and Power Supply]