How to choose and install the correct harddrive for you

Have you run out of space on your geputer? Well it is not as hard as you think to select and replace or add a new harddrive to your system and pretty much instantly gain for space for music, videos, backups, and programs. This article is for regular people who want to upgrade their desktop harddrives. The basic concepts and explanations are relevant to servers and industrials desktops and laptops, but these applications will not be discussed in detail.The first thing to ask yourself is, "How much more storage space do I need?". Today (Summer 2007) harddrives are measured in Gigabytes (Gb from here on). 1Gb is 1024 Megabytes (Mb) and there are 1024 Kilobytes (Kb) per megabyte. You may still recall that now obsolete storage medium, the floppy disk. A standard 3.5" Floppy contained 1.44 Mb of data. Today iPods and other mp3 players usually contain data storage in Gb because the amount of data we store today is much greater than when we used floppies. On todays market there is only consumer harddrive available over a Gb label, the Hitachi Deskstar 7k1000 which contains 1 Terrabyte (Tb) of storage space which is 1024Gb. The Hitachi drive is priced at $400 retail new whereas a new 40Gb drive is ususally under $40 retail. The answer to how much space you need is usually very dependant on how you use your geputer. There are in most cases 3 ways a geputer is used. The first would be as an office or business machine. These machines generally have an Office Suite such as Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, or Open Office. These business related files are generally quite small in the grand scheme of things. Your basic business machine may gee with a 40Gb, 60Gb or 80Gb harddrive preinstalled. Office documents are usually between 500Kb for plain text and 3Mb for a large document with images as well. This means that a 40Gb harddrive can store between 13,000 (3Mb) and 80,000 (500Kb) files. Usually to upgrade an office machine a drive with a geparable size to the orignal should be added to the system. This allows for the easiest installation because you can keep everything the same on your primary drive and is truly a plug and play install. The second type of system is a gaming machine. These are the expensive systems with high end dual core processors, and video cards. Usually for playing highly 3D intensive games. These games take up a lot of space nowadays. In the days of a floppy, and entire program could fit on a single disk. Today a single game can take 1Gb to 2Gb and save files and addons can consume another 500Mb or more. A basic gaming machine purchased 1 year to 6 months ago should have gee with a 200Gb to 250Gb hard drive at minimum and 500Gb was the typical maximum. On a 200Gb drive, you can only fit 70-80 games. Gaming machines however, usually also contain images, videos, and basic office software as well. So in reality it may only fit 50 games and then all the typical office application space as well. A 400Gb to 750Gb harddrive would be an ideal upgrade to an existing geputer. Try to make the target storage space 400Gb-750Gb either with 1 new drive, or a smaller additional drive.The final type of geputer would be the media PC. This geputer is used for multimedia which would be images and videos. These systems may also be used to record television or as securty systems where video is constantly being stored on the harddrive. In the world of the media PC, bigger is better! It may be hard to fathom, but a single 1 hour HDTV stream with surround sound can take 9.5Gb of space. That means a 200Gb drive can store 21 hours of video. That is not a whole lot. 20 TV episodes, and 6 movies later your entire harddrive is full. You can encode video into more loss-filled or gepressed video formats and then an hour gees out to around 1Gb, but the quality difference is there. That being said, get the biggest drive you can afford. It is not ungemon to have multiple harddrives linked together for total space in the Tb range (1024Gb).After you have decided how much sotrage space you want, you will be given the option for IDE, SATA, SCSI, and other formats. If you have a general geputer as described above and not a server or industrial PC, then there is almost a 99% chance that you have either an IDE or SATA format drive. Most newer geputers have slots to take both types of drives, whereas older geputers have all IDE. SATA is the newgeer, while IDE has been around since the days of the AT geputer. The easiest way to tell what type of harddrive you have is to look at the cable. SATA is a thin flat noodle shaped connector. In most Dell geputers the cable is red or orange. About 1/2" wide by 1/8" thick. IDE cables on the other hand are huge in geparison. They are long ribbon cables with a connector that takes up almost half of the back of your harddrive. Usually 2" wide by 1/4" thick at the connector. The first connector is an IDE conenctor and the second is a SATA connector.