Hi everyone,
Today I will be talking about hard drives and what to keep in mind when buying one. I am also in the market myself for a couple of hard drives and as such the ideas I will give are the ones I myself am using.
First of all let's cover the types of hard drives available. One of course is the classic Hard Drive which you see in every computer. Faster SATA technology have enabled them to read and write data at a very fast speed and the fact that the technology has been around for a very long time, means that the hard drives of today are very stable and can give you years of safe and worry free operation. The other type or hard drives are SSD (Solid State Drives.) They are built on flash memory and as such have no moving parts like conventional drives. This gives them a very long life, very fast read/write speeds but comes at increased cost as Flash Drives are expensive to make compared to a conventional Hard Drive.
So what should you keep in mind? Well first is the available ports on your motherboard which can tell you how fast of a hard drive you can buy. My motherboard has both SATA II and SATA III ports and as such, I am looking to fill first the SATA III ports. The difference between the two is that SATA II is capable of supporting up to 3.0 Gb/s data transfer rates while SATA III can support up to 6.0 Gb/s data transfer rates. Next in case of the conventional hard drives, the speed of the disk. There are several speeds you can select from such as 5400 RPM, 5900 RPM, 7200 RPM with some going up to 15000 RPM. If you are gaming, it would be best two get at least a 7200 RPM disk which can deliver data at a fast enough rate that you will not face lag or wait time as your data loads. If however you want a media disk or one that uses less power and is more "eco-friendly" go for slower RPM disks like a 5400 RPM disk.
In a ideal world, I will have one drive for all my media and one for gaming.
So what will you do with an SSD? SSDs since they have no moving parts and are built on flash technology have little to no lag when it comes to seeking, reading and writing data. Capable of blistering speeds, a SSD is perfect to put your Operating System on as well as games which are very demanding of your hardware. The price however will make you think long and hard about what size to get. As a comparison a 1TB SATA III 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda is selling for $99.99 right now. Whereas for the same price, a SATA III OCZ Solid 3 has only 120GB of space. You can also find 60GB SSDs for the same price from some companies. An even faster type of SSD comes with a PCI-E connector instead of SATA and the cheapest one you can find is for $249.99 and it has 110GB worth of space (An OCZ RevoDrive.)
However with your OS on the SSD, you can see very fast load times and very fast operation for everything that is on it.
In an idea world with both an SSD and a HDD, I will have one HDD for data, one for gaming, one SSD for my OS and if possible, one SSD for my most demanding games (or possible one bigger SSD for both things.)
Because there are so many sizes and varieties of hard drives out there, I am giving links for SATA III HDDs, SATA II HDDs, SATA III SSDs, SATA II SSDs and PCI-E SSDs
In the HDDs, my favorite companies are Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung. In SSDs my favorites are OCZ, Kingston, Samsung, Corsair and Intel. All of these companies are very good and my money will be wisely spent on any of them.
Ideally I would get a 1TB 5400 RPM SATA III drive for my media, a 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III for my games, a 60-90 GB SATA III SSD for my OS and another 60-90 GB SATA III SSD for my games. I know my idea may seem excessive and you can just as well get two drives and be good and I agree. My personal idea is that the more spread out my data is among my hard drives, the less overall each drive will be used and as a result the longer they will last. Also if one of my Hard Drives goes bad, I don't lose everything. You can of course back up your important data to ensure you don't lose it all and I intend to do the same, however if I have enough money, I will buy drives like I have mentioned. But for now I will probably buy one 7200 RPM SATA III 1-2 TB Hard Drive and one 90-120GB SATA III SSD.
I realize this was a very wordy post and I do apologize for it, but I thought it was important to understand the significance of buying drives and how I am going about it.
My next post will cover some dream builds I have come up with, complete with pictures!!
Till then,
Kiyoshi Out.
Today I will be talking about hard drives and what to keep in mind when buying one. I am also in the market myself for a couple of hard drives and as such the ideas I will give are the ones I myself am using.
First of all let's cover the types of hard drives available. One of course is the classic Hard Drive which you see in every computer. Faster SATA technology have enabled them to read and write data at a very fast speed and the fact that the technology has been around for a very long time, means that the hard drives of today are very stable and can give you years of safe and worry free operation. The other type or hard drives are SSD (Solid State Drives.) They are built on flash memory and as such have no moving parts like conventional drives. This gives them a very long life, very fast read/write speeds but comes at increased cost as Flash Drives are expensive to make compared to a conventional Hard Drive.
So what should you keep in mind? Well first is the available ports on your motherboard which can tell you how fast of a hard drive you can buy. My motherboard has both SATA II and SATA III ports and as such, I am looking to fill first the SATA III ports. The difference between the two is that SATA II is capable of supporting up to 3.0 Gb/s data transfer rates while SATA III can support up to 6.0 Gb/s data transfer rates. Next in case of the conventional hard drives, the speed of the disk. There are several speeds you can select from such as 5400 RPM, 5900 RPM, 7200 RPM with some going up to 15000 RPM. If you are gaming, it would be best two get at least a 7200 RPM disk which can deliver data at a fast enough rate that you will not face lag or wait time as your data loads. If however you want a media disk or one that uses less power and is more "eco-friendly" go for slower RPM disks like a 5400 RPM disk.
In a ideal world, I will have one drive for all my media and one for gaming.
So what will you do with an SSD? SSDs since they have no moving parts and are built on flash technology have little to no lag when it comes to seeking, reading and writing data. Capable of blistering speeds, a SSD is perfect to put your Operating System on as well as games which are very demanding of your hardware. The price however will make you think long and hard about what size to get. As a comparison a 1TB SATA III 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda is selling for $99.99 right now. Whereas for the same price, a SATA III OCZ Solid 3 has only 120GB of space. You can also find 60GB SSDs for the same price from some companies. An even faster type of SSD comes with a PCI-E connector instead of SATA and the cheapest one you can find is for $249.99 and it has 110GB worth of space (An OCZ RevoDrive.)
However with your OS on the SSD, you can see very fast load times and very fast operation for everything that is on it.
In an idea world with both an SSD and a HDD, I will have one HDD for data, one for gaming, one SSD for my OS and if possible, one SSD for my most demanding games (or possible one bigger SSD for both things.)
Because there are so many sizes and varieties of hard drives out there, I am giving links for SATA III HDDs, SATA II HDDs, SATA III SSDs, SATA II SSDs and PCI-E SSDs
In the HDDs, my favorite companies are Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung. In SSDs my favorites are OCZ, Kingston, Samsung, Corsair and Intel. All of these companies are very good and my money will be wisely spent on any of them.
Ideally I would get a 1TB 5400 RPM SATA III drive for my media, a 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III for my games, a 60-90 GB SATA III SSD for my OS and another 60-90 GB SATA III SSD for my games. I know my idea may seem excessive and you can just as well get two drives and be good and I agree. My personal idea is that the more spread out my data is among my hard drives, the less overall each drive will be used and as a result the longer they will last. Also if one of my Hard Drives goes bad, I don't lose everything. You can of course back up your important data to ensure you don't lose it all and I intend to do the same, however if I have enough money, I will buy drives like I have mentioned. But for now I will probably buy one 7200 RPM SATA III 1-2 TB Hard Drive and one 90-120GB SATA III SSD.
I realize this was a very wordy post and I do apologize for it, but I thought it was important to understand the significance of buying drives and how I am going about it.
My next post will cover some dream builds I have come up with, complete with pictures!!
Till then,
Kiyoshi Out.
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