subject: 3 Mistakes To Avoid When Buying A New Hard Drive [print this page] When your hard drive fails or when you simply want to upgrade to a faster drive or a drive with more storage, it is important to know what you are getting into and to research your options thoroughly. Not everyone understands what to look for when buying a new hard drive and mistakes can be made when people focus only on one aspect of a drive's features rather than on the package offered by the drive as a whole.
Buying and installing a new hard drive is an investment in both time and money, so it only makes sense to want to avoid choosing the wrong drive and needing to replace ?it? again or being disappointed by the drive's performance. To avoid this undesirable result, here are four common mistakes that people make when buying a new hard drive that you can learn from and avoid making:
1. Ignoring the drive speed. Most people focus on the size of the drive and don't stop to think about the drive speed. A slow drive can slow down your computer's performance overall and can make using the computer an exercise in frustration. Avoid this by paying attention to the drive's speed, and in particular, the seek speed. The seek speed measures the amount of time that it will take the drive to find a specific few sectors. Compare the seek speeds among different drives and, when all other things are equal or almost equal, choose the faster drive.
2. Failing to get a large enough drive. The cost per gigabyte of data is relatively small, so there is no reason to skimp on drive size when you are buying a new hard drive. Yet, many people underestimate the amount of storage space that they will actually need on their new drives. With more and more applications and uses being developed for the computer every day, it is a smart choice to get a drive that provides more storage than you think you will need.
3. Not understanding what you are buying. Some drives can seem different than what they actually are. For instance, a terabyte hard drive may not actually be one drive but may instead be two 500 gigabyte hard drives that work in a RAID zero configuration. Although this can result in a fast drive, it can also double the chance of a drive failure since you now have two drives that could potentially fail instead of just one.
These are three common errors that people make that can result in dissatisfaction with a new drive purchase. When you are shopping for your next drive, be sure to take the time to carefully review the specs of the drive you are thinking about buying and to avoid making the mistake of not being aware of size, speed or structure.
You should also always shop for a new drive and avoid buying used. The operating life of a hard drive is so heavily affected by environment and how the previous owners cared for the drive, that buying used can lead to major problems and be the biggest mistake you can make in your drive purchase.
