How To Choose
A Hard Drive And
Other Storage Devices

There are many devices which can be used to store or write data in your computer system. The options include hard drives, solid state drives, CD writers, DVD writers and Blu-ray writers. Hard drives, in particular, are a very essential (and delicate) piece of equipment and a standard feature on most computers. External hard drives with USB / Firewire interfaces are now also extremely popular with consumers.

What makes the right data storage device for your computer? The answer depends on what you will use for. Most people will need at least a DVD writer and hard drive in their computers. For hard drives, if you need the largest storage space possible, then go for large capacity drives in the region of Terabytes (TB). Some folks might decide they don't even need a CD or DVD writer since most of their data is stored in the hard drive or USB thumb drive. The choice is yours.

This article will give you some tips on selecting the proper data storage devices for your PC.

Some hard drives and DVD drives available in the market
 

1. Hard Drives

First, let's cover hard drives. We'll look at some hard drive terms like ATA and SCSI, as well as cover the factors to consider when buying a new drive.

ATA and SCSI
Let's get some terminology out of the way before we go further. In the hard drive world, there are two data access standards, ATA and SCSI (pronounced 'Scar-Zee'). The ATA standard is split further into Parallel ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA).

Most of hard drives you see in shops these days are using the SATA standard. The latest standard is SATA 6.0 GB/s which is extremely fast - allowing transfer speeds of up to 600 MB/s To use SATA, you'll need a Serial ATA controller, a SATA drive and a SATA power cable. All of these are built into new generation motherboards.

The SCSI standard is a very fast hard drive standard used for professional computer systems which demand extremely fast data access. SCSI drives provide an access time of about 9.5ms - which I feel is really not needed for average home use.

Size and Speed
For hard drives, we only need to look at two things - size and speed. Most hard drive manufacturers out there rate their drive sizes in gigabytes (GB). Terabyte (TB) are becoming very common due to immense storage requirements for digital video and games. Do take note that once your hard drive is formatted, the actual disk space you have will be less.

The speed of a hard drive is indicated by its spin rate. Most consumer hard drives spin at a 7200 rpm rate. You can get some high performance drives spinning at a 10000 rpm spin rate. There are also energy-efficient drives called green drives which spin at slower rates such as 5400 rpm or can have variable rates depending on factors like heat produced.

If data access speed is important to you, you can go for faster SATA drives or SCSI drives. But remember that these drives come at a price premium and may not be necessary for average home use. Another option is to use a RAID setup where multiple hard disks are used to gain drive performance and/or data integrity (see below).

Disk Space vs. Price
An important factor to consider is the disk space versus price ratio. When you look at the 300 GB, 500 GB and 800 GB hard drives, you'll find they are very close in price. If you don't mind paying an extra $20 or so, I'd say go for the maximum disk space you can get! Take note that these days, for the average home user, I'd say you should go for 1 TB drives considering the amount of media we store.
 

 A Western Digital 1 TB SATA hard drive

Hard Drive Usage
The type of hard drive you should get also depends on the type of tasks you will be using the computer for. As a general guideline, here are some of the common computing tasks out there and what I think the minimum hard drive size and speed should be:

• Word Processing: 250GB and Higher, 7200rpm
• Web Surfing: 320GB and Higher, 7200rpm
• Gaming: 500GB and Higher, 7200 rpm
• Digital Music: 750GB and Higher, 7200 rpm
• Graphics Editing: 1TB and Higher, 7200 rpm
• Digital Video: 1.5TB and Higher, 7200 rpm
   

RAID
Another term that you may hear about when buying hard drives is the term Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID). RAID is something that has existed in the PC world for many year. It is now becoming very popular for What does it do? It allows you to use multiple hard drives for performance, data reliability or both. Read this article to find out more.
 

2. Solid State Drives

You may hear about the term "Solid State Drive". The Solid State Drive (SSD) uses a series of flash memory modules to store the data without any moving parts. This results faster performance and higher reliability at the cost of lower capacities. And I mean extremely FAST performance - you can essentially boot Windows 7 in about 7 seconds with these babies (no kidding). A good example of where solid state memory is used are in mobile devices like pen drives and iPods. Solid state drives are still quite expensive and therefore rare in desktops - but even this is beginning to change as memory prices keep dropping.
 

A solid state drive from OCZ
 

3. CD Writers

CD writers are a very standardized piece of computer equipment. Some CD burners maybe be listed as a combo or CD-RW/DVD drive (i.e. they can support reading and writing to CD media and but can only read DVD media). I'd not recommend buying a CD writer these days - go for a DVD writer instead.
 

4. DVD Writers

DVD writers are a standard feature in desktop PCs these days. They let you store up to 4.7 GB on a single disc, several times the amount of on a CD-RW disc. Let's look at some factors to consider when purchasing a new DVD drive.

Drive Speed
One factor to consider when buying DVD writers is drive speed. Most DVD drives have now improved writing speeds, reaching up to 24X. And the best thing is they are very cheap and can be bought for just tens of dollars.

Compatibility
There is a huge range of DVD media formats out there (DVD+R, DVD-R,DVD+R DL), represented by various brands. You need to consider compatibility of your DVD writer with these DVD discs. DVD-R and DVD+R formats are both very compatible with existing DVD players and DVD-ROM drives - so try to get a player that supports those.

Internal or External
You can choose between an internal or external DVD writer. Internal drives are cheaper but it also means you need to deal with the installation hassle and non-portability. External DVD writers now come with FireWire or USB 3.0 interfaces and may well be a better choice if you need to move your data around a lot.
 

5. Blu-ray Drives

Blu-ray drives typically come in three flavors. First, Blu-ray readers can read any of your CD, DVD and Blu-ray formats. Blu-ray combo drives can only read Blu-ray discs but can read and write CDs and DVDs as well. Blu-ray burners can do it all, reading and writing to CD, DVD and Blu-ray formats. I find Blu-ray writers still quite expensive so I would not recommend it to home users at this point, until their price point drops.

A Blu-ray drive burner from LG
 

Conclusion

To purchase a good storage device, be it a hard drive, solid state drive, CD writer, DVD writer or Blu-ray drive, you need to consider what price you're willing to pay for a given set of features. In my opinion, the hard drive and DVD writer is a de-facto standard in any home user's PC. Items like solid state drives and Blu-ray drives are more optional for me as you have to shell out quite a lot of cash for these devices. If you're building a new computer, you should definitely take the above points into consideration.

Check out some good deals on hard drives and other storage devices here.