In the last post we looked at a simple rule that you can use when buying a hard drive for your computer. In this post I am going to look at some of the more technical details to be considered when buying a hard drive.

Interface type

First thing to know is that in the home PC world there is basically two types of hard drive interfaces that we need to be concerned with, SCSI and ATA. The ATA standard has also recently been separated further into Parallel ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA) with SATA being the interface being used by the majority of recent drives.  SCSI is more often used in professional systems that demand fast and stable data access and is probably overkill for a home system. I would suggest going for a  hard drive that uses a SATA interface which is supported by the majority of the newer drives on the market. However you do need to make sure your motherboard has the necessary controllers  (Most modern motherboards will).

Capacity

The other things to think about are disk capacity and speed. As most people know the capacity of a hard drive is usually measured in Gigabytes although soon it may be Terabytes!  As we mentioned in the last post the size of the drive you need will be determined by what you want to do with your computer but as a rule of thumb you should buy the biggest drive you can afford. I would recommend at least a 500 GB or 750 GB drive.
Speed and Cache

A disk’s data access speed is a function of the rotation speed of the disk inside the hard drive and the amount of memory cache included with the drive. The rotation speed is measured in RPMs  (Rotations per Minute). The faster the drive rotates, the more quickly data can be written to and read from, the hard drive.  I would generally recommend buying a 7200 RPM drive. A drive’s memory cache helps to speed up the accessing of the information on the drive and the more of it the better. Drives with a higher capacity will have often have 32 MB or more of cache which would be my recommendation.

A good choice might be the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 - Hard drive which is  a 750 GB, 7200 RPM drive with a 32 MB cache.

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.

A couple of days ago I posted about the “instant on” feature that Dell has now included in its new range of Latitude laptops.  Essentially the idea is that  included with your normal operating system you have a small but completely separate sub system that will let you have very quick access to the Internet and your emails. This sub system is based on an embedded Linux-based internet appliance-like environment running off a flash memory chip,  linked directly to the BIOS. This avoids having to boot up your full system or to continuously maintain it in a “suspend” state saving both  time and battery life.

Dell and Asus

This a pretty interesting idea and not one that just Dell is looking at either.  Asus have also been developing systems and components that have this capability.  The Asus brand name for
this is called Express Gate and is essentially an Asus branded version of the Splashtop product from embedded Linux developer DeviceVM.

Laptops and motherboards

Asus have been aggressively introducing this into a significant proportion of its motherboard range and like Dell is now selling laptops which include this feature.  We will  have a look at a couple of the Asus laptops and some of the feature of Splashtop in future posts.  However if you are building your own PC and like the idea, you can now get Asus motherboards that support Express Gate. The Asus P5Q Deluxe Motherboard is a good example of a well rated board that includes Express Gate.

I haven’t been able to actually try any “instant on” system yet. Have you?