How to Buy a Hard Drive: An Essential Guide

Posted 08/24/2011 at 1:54pm | by Loyd Case

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The Basic Office PC

This might also be called the shared living room PC. It’s usually light on performance, often with integrated graphics. The applications aren’t demanding, either – office apps and internet browsing are the mainstays, with some occasional digital photo or media transcoding. The entire price of the system might be under $500.

“Green” hard drives use less power mostly by slower rotation speeds, but also offer added sleep modes to help reduce power consumption.

This is the perfect PC for one of those low power green hard drives. If you’re upgrading an existing, older system, cloning the boot drive to a 1TB Western Digital GreenPower or Seagate Barracuda Green will improve responsiveness and substantially increase capacity.

The Laptop Upgrade

Your laptop is several years old, but you can’t really justify refreshing the entire unit just yet. If the HDD in the laptop is 250GB or less, definitely consider replacing it with a 120GB SSD. Sure, you’ll give up some capacity, but you’ll gain some immediate benefits:

• Boot times will be much faster. Waiting for laptops to boot off slow, 5,400RPM 2.5-inch drives is like watching grass grow.
• You can use hibernate rather than sleep mode. Sleep consumes more power than hibernate, but a system with an SSD will come back from hibernate nearly as fast as a system waking up from sleep.
• SSDs are rugged, since there are no moving parts. So the shocks and jolts experienced by most mobile PCs will have little effect on an SSD.

If you need capacity in a laptop, this 7,200RPM, 750GB drive from Western Digital fits the bill.

If you really need capacity in your laptop – you travel a lot with your camera, for example, and are frequently copying and editing photos – get a high capacity, 7,200RPM drive, like Western Digital’s Scorpio Black 750GB drive. An interesting alternative would be Seagate’s 500GB Momentus XT Hybrid, which combines a 4GB flash memory cache with a 7,200 RPM hard drive. Performance is somewhat better than a standard hard drive, though the gains aren’t nearly what they would be with a true SSD.

A Digital Media Studio

You edit a lot of photos – particularly raw DSLR photos. Or you shoot video and need a fast system with lots of capacity to edit your digital movies. You need both capacity and performance, because waiting around for large media files to load is painful. But what you get depends on your budget. There’s also the issue of data security – backups are critical, but we won’t discuss those here.
Let’s look at some possible storage configurations.

• If your budget is tight, consider a 7,200RPM, 2TB drive with 64MB of cache. These typically cost $150 or less.
• If you’ve got a few bucks more, build the system with a fast 1TB drive for the applications and a secondary, 2TB drive for data and scratch files.
• If your budget can spare several hundred dollars for storage, add a third, 2TB drive and combine it in a RAID 1 (that’s right, RAID 1) array for data redundancy. Write performance will be a tad slower, but read performance with RAID 1 is actually a little better than a single drive.
• If you have a boatload of money, get a 240-256GB SSD as the boot drive. Use that for the apps and for the scratch files. Put all the data on a second, 2TB RAID 0 array. (You can use 3TB drives, too, but you may encounter technical issues with some motherboard BIOSes, as well as the need to configure them as GPT partitions if you’re using Windows.)

Unless you’re filthy rich, you won’t build an all SSD digital media editing system – capacity is often king here. If you are filthy rich, it may be worth exploring dedicated hardware RAID cards and RAID 10 arrays or something similar.

Killer Gaming Rig

Games really benefit from the speed of SSDs – but games take up a vast amount of space. If all you can afford is a modest gaming system – under $1,000 – SSDs are probably out of the picture.

Or are they?

For under a hundred bucks, you can pick up a 60GB SSD. But don’t use it as a boot drive. Instead, build your gaming system using a motherboard with an Intel Z68 chipset and use the small SSD as a cache for a larger (1TB or so) hard drive. (Intel brands this as “Smart Response Technology.”) You’ll see substantially improved storage throughput. All you need to do is first install Windows on the rotating media drive (making sure that RAID mode is enabled in the system BIOS), then add the SSD and configure it as a cache in the RAID BIOS or through Intel’s software utilities.

Intel’s Z68 chipset plus Smart Response adds a whole new wrinkle to modestly priced systems, and may be a bigger speed improvement with minimal cost than buying a faster CPU – though for a gaming rig, we’d choose a faster graphics card and sacrifice the SSD if we were on a really tight budget. Right now, Smart Response is only on the Z68, so AMD users or gamers running Intel X58 triple channel rigs don’t have that option.

This 250GB Intel 510 SSD is an excellent solution for a high end gaming rig, if you can afford it.

If you have a generous budget for a gaming system, a 250GB drive will handle your main apps plus a number of games; you can still add a second drive for other types of data, if you need it. And if you happen to have a lot of spare cash on hand, a second 250GB SSD in RAID 0 mode is actually more affordable than a single 500GB SSD in today’s market.

Everyone’s storage needs differ, but it used to be simpler: find a hard drive with the right combination of price, capacity and speed for your needs. Today, though, SSDs have upended the equation, and the right mix for your own need may be the right mix of SSD and HDD. What that combination is depends on your needs, budget and technical inclination.