Big
hard drive sizes are very common today. The
main reason for this are the prices that have
declined so much over the past few years.
Price for a one gigabyte of storage have
fallen from $7.00 a gigabyte in fall, 1999, to
$3.50 a gigabyte in January, 2001, to
as low as $.50 for a gigabyte today.
Good hard
drives should have features as following:
-
< 9.0
ms access speed (or faster)
-
7200
RPM (Revolutions Per Minute)
-
Ultra
ATA/100 interface
-
2-8 MB
buffer
-
Burst
transfer rate of 100 MB
-
MTBF
(Mean Time Between Failures) of 750,000
hours
-
3 year
warranty
-
Reliable manufacturer home page with
technical support and FTP site.
The
manufacturers I would recommend are IBM, and
Western Digital. I would advise you to steer
away from Maxtor hard drives as they have a
history of poor quality. I have 80 gig Western
Digital hard drive and am very satisfied with
it. I would not recommend hard disks that are
smaller than 60 gigabytes in size. The price
difference is so small between different sizes
of hard drives that buying the bigger one
should be a simple to make decision. Today's
programs take much more space than they used
to.
Listed below are some of the Hard Drives that
would be my recommendation.
BUDGET
PC/BUSINESS PC
Don't
buy below 80GB hard disk even though we are
talking about budget PC here. The price
difference between 60 and 80 GB hard disk is
so small (only around $5) that it's simply not worth to save a
few dollars and buy a smaller hard drive.
Western Digital Caviar 80GB / 7200 / 8MB / 8.9
/ ATA-100 EIDE Hard Drive
MULTIMEDIA PC/GAMING PC/HOME THEATER
You will
need a hard disk of at least 160 GB. Preferably
even more. You will probably work with large
media files and a big hard drive is required.
Seagate
160GB / 7200 / 2MB / 9.0 / ATA-100 EIDE Hard
Drive.
Most of
160GB hard drives cost less
than $90 which is unbelievably cheap for this
much storage. Therefore aim for a bigger hard
drive as you will get more for your money.
