HDD Selection

Post date: Mar 13, 2010 8:13:05 PM

January 2008

August 07 I bought a Toshiba Tecra laptop. This came with a 80GB stock HDD. 5400rpm and 8MB cache. I should mention that this laptop was bought with the intention of use in my university. So mostly office use and hardcore simulation of circuits and stuff. Oh the occasional Counter-Strike. Within first 3 months my HDD was 90% full. Now I had a choice for my second term at uni

• 1. 1) Buy a external HDD (3.5" or 2.5")

  2. 2) replace my stock HDD with a higher capacity one

External HDD was an excellent option as i could use it for backup as well. For this option I had two schemes in mind.

• 1. 1)Move all my first term's work onto the external HDD and start new term with clean HDD

  2. 2)Use the external for storing all work. Backups, archives and frequent use files.

But then I realised wait Laptops are meant to be mobile... If my work is on a external I will have to carry that around as well. I didn't want this.

So to option 2, replace stock HDD. This option was great. I started looking around for prices and HDDs just before Christmas 07. Dabs, Ebuyer and PC World were my first few stops. PC world didn't have the HDDs I was looking for, their HDD capacity was too low or the price too high. I do NOT recommend PC world (online or store) for any PC buys. Dabs and eBuyer had similar HDD options. Dabs listed 160GB, 200GB for price range of £80 to £120. My budget was max £100. I wasn't worried about if it was 5400rpm or 7200rpm as my use didn't require high performance as long as it was adequate for "recommended" features. Capacity was my necessity.

On eBuyer, I found a special deal on a Western Digital Scorpio 250GB for ~£70 free shipping. I looked around Dabs a bit more but wasn't able to find a similar or better deal. In short my HDD is SATA-I, 5400rpm and 8MB cache.

In conclusion if you want to chose a new HDD consider the following:

• 1. 1)Budget?

High performance budget must be over£120

Medium performance upto £100 is sufficient

For High Performance

• • ¬ Cache - 16Mb

  • ¬ RPM - 7200rpm

  • Medium performance

• 1. ¬ Cache - 8MB

  2. ¬ rpm - 5400rpm is sufficient

  3. 2) Capacity? but no emphasis performance?

for day to day office work - 80GB->120GB

for unversity students - 160GB->250GB

For Amateur designers, media editors(video) - 250GB+

Don't want internal disk? consider firewire or ethernet NAS? in raid storage capabilities go as high as you want or of-the-shelf products currently provide 2TB(teraByte = 1024GB) capacity which is extremely large

• 1. 3)Performance Emphasis?

at least 160GB

16MB Cache

7200rpm

have no budget? then consider SSD(Solid State Disk)

If you have any question (specific or general) regarding HDD selection or for that matter any PC related Hardware queries please write to me using the comments below.