Continuing our series of posts on the subject of building your own PC lets have a look at buying a hard disk drive. The disk drive is the all important central storage area for your PC. It is the persistent memory in which all your personal data resides when the computer is turned off and from where it can be retrieved when next using the computer.

Choosing a disk drive

Just like for other key components choosing the right hard disk drive for your home build computer depends to a large extent on how you want to use your computer. Over the years the capacity the capacity of disk drives has increased dramatically from Megabytes to Terabytes. A good thing too as we care now producing a huge amount of personal content, in the form of music, image, video files and the increasing disk requirements of some modern games.  If you are someone who is into digital photography or video in a big way then you are going to need big amounts of storage, however if your computer is a more business computer used largely for storing letters, documents and email etc. then your requirements are significantly less.

Apply the sweet spot rule

However the simple rule to apply when purchasing a drive is too buy the largest capacity drive that you can afford. Even if you are the business user I mentioned above you will undoubtedly need more capacity than you initially think.  Similar to when we looked at CPU’s there is a often a sweet spot of value that sits below the premium you would pay for the top of the range products. The value sweet spot is generally the third or fourth tier down from that top of the range model, assuming of course it is using the more modern Serial ATA (SATA) drive interface. A example might be the Samsung SpinPoint HD753LJ F1 750GB drive.

In an upcoming post we are going to look at some of the more technical differences and aspects, such as SATA, that you may want to consider when choosing a drive.