List Four Factors to Consider When Purchasing a Hard Drive

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The Answer is The capacity of the drive.Today's hard drives for desktop systems are in the range of 80 GB to more than 1.5 TB.The more gigabytes or terabytes,the higher the price.

The spindle speed.Hard drives for desktop systems run at 5400,7200,or 10,000 RPM (revolutions per minute).The most common is 7200 RPM.The higher the RPMs,the faster the drive.

The interface standard.Use the standards your motherboard supports.For SATA,most likely that will be SATA-300.For a PATA IDE drive,most likely that will be Ultra ATA-100.For external drives,common standards are eSATA,FireWire 800 or 400,and Hi-Speed USB.

The cache or buffer size.Buffers improve hard drive performance and can range in size from 2 MB to 32 MB.The more the better,though the cost goes up as the size increases.

The average seek time (time to fetch data).Look for 13 to 8.5 ms (milliseconds).The lower the number,the higher the drive performance and cost.

Hybrid drive.A hybrid drive costs more,but performs better than other comparable desktop drives.Solid state drives are currently only available for laptops.

List Four Factors to Consider When Purchasing a Hard Drive

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