Top 5 Things to Know Before Buying a New Hard Drive

Switching out an older hard drive with a new one can be a great idea. You can heavily increase the amount of data you can store or improve your overall system performance, and it's really not too difficult a process; many home users are perfectly capable of switching out a hard drive, and the instructions included with any internal hard drive clearly explain how to switch a drive out or add in a new secondary drive. Here's a list of a few things that you should keep in mind when buying and installing a new internal hard drive.

1. Faster is better. The hard drive heads have to be extremely fast to pull up information quickly, and while most drives on the market are, there are still some slower ones out there, usually offered at a heavy discount. Don't skimp on the speed of your new hard drive to cut down on cost; you need a drive that spins at at least 7200RPM or you'll notice a definite decrease in drive performance.

2. Buy name brands. I can't stress this enough--it takes very expensive and very precise equipment to make a good hard drive, and generic companies simply don't have it. Make sure your drive is made by a company that has a record in the industry. A few major hard drive manufacturers are Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, and Maxtor.

3. You can't just plug a hard drive in. Well, actually, you kind of can, but the computer will need to know whether your drive is intended for use as a primary (sometimes called "master") or secondary (sometimes known as "slave") drive. If you're putting in a second hard drive, it'll probably need to be set up as a slave; if this is going to be the primary drive you use for programs and an operating system, it will be your "master" drive. You can designate your drive as either by changing around the jumper settings; your hard drive's manual will tell you how to do this.

4. Your operating system and programs won't transfer over. Many users make this mistake; there are a number of nontransferable files embedded in a computer's operating system and programs that makes transferring them over to a new computer in a working condition extremely difficult, and impossible in some cases. Plan on digging up your old Windows (or whatever other operating system you uses) install disks and locating install files or CDs for all of your programs.

5. Know what kind of connection system your computer uses. Most computers use a standard IDE (or EIDE) connection, but some drives use SATA or SCSI, all of which have their particular pros and cons. If you don't even have a computer yet, you should probably research your choices and decide what works best for you, but if you do have a computer, check to make sure you're buying the right drive type.

Most home desktop computers will be EIDE. You should be able to find this information on the old hard drive's cover.