Hard-Drive

Hard drives are the Filing Cabinet of a computer. This is where programs, pictures, music documents and other files are stored. Five or 6 years ago, a typical hard drive was 40GB, was 4400 rpm (rotation speed) and was an IDE drive and was considered big and fast. Today, that is a very small dinosaur. Standard today is at least 250GB at 7200 rpm and is a SATA drive. The transfer rate on today's drive is considerably faster!

(Internal Hard Drive)

In the picture above, it shows a platter (actually a pile of platters), that rotates at 4400, 5500. 7800 or even as high as 10,000 rpm! The actuator arm moves from track to track (called seeking). in the red circle, you see the IDE connector. IDE is Independent Drive Electronics, an older Technology.

Today we use SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drive (see below) because the data rate is faster. Red circle shows the SATA connectors.

Note: older motherboards did not have SATA connectors!

In the picture below, we show 3.5" desktop drive, and the much smaller 2.5 inch laptop drive. Smaller is not better for cooling, capacity or speed. Smaller is better for laptops for size and weight. I do not expect a laptop drive to perform as well or as long as a desktop drive. But, when I was a frequent traveler, I sure wanted things smaller!! Hence the attraction to tablets and the Solid State Drives!

3.5 Inch Desktop Drive	2.5 Laptop Hard Drive(left)

Hard Drive in Desktop case

Many of my customers call the tower (Desktop Case, with all the parts inside) the "Hard Drive". That's because most have never actually seen a hard drive.

Do you know your Hard Drive Capacity? If you have an older system (over 3 years old), you may need more Hard-Drive-Capacity. If you have a lot of photos and/or music, you may be low on space. Also, if your hard drive is close to full, your PC will slow down, substantially!

Upgrading your computer with a new hard drive.

New hard drives can be added to your computer. The simplest way is to just add a drive as a secondary drive, for additional capacity, (storing more music, pictures, etc.).

If you wanted your computer to be faster, you should have a qualified technician do a full drive copy from your old hard drive to a new hard drive. This would put your operating system (Windows) on the new faster hard drive. If the old hard drive is still good, it could be used as a secondary, for more capacity. The technician would also check your motherboard to see if it can handle SATA drives. If they can, they should install a SATA drive.

SATA Connectors - Red Circle ....... IDE connectors - Green Circle

Hard Drives from Amazon

Look at these drives, to learn more. Hard drives have gone up sharply in price, which has been attributed to the flooding in Thailand, Hopefully the price will fall back to normal this year, particularly with the increased interest in SSD (solid State Drives) used in tablets, and some laptops,

If you want technical support click Computer Support