#1.Brand/series/model: In the world of hard drives there are always few big name,and that is Samsung, Seagate,and Western Digita.Nevertheless,many other companies that also make high quality storage devices with low cost and affordable prices,like Hitachi,Fujitsu,Toshiba and many more.
Computer storage options we have now including internal and external usb hard drives.Often,hard drive manufactures release their drives in series, in general the newer series tend to be faster then the older series, even if not by much.
Interface: Currently SATA 3.0gb/s is the newest type of standard interface for hard drives.If you don't what is SATA. SATA stands for" Serial Advanced Technology Attachment".And Sata 3 simply mean the maximum transfer rate that interface is capable of. 3.0gb/s .Previously we have SATA I ,SATA 2 . SATA I had a maximum transfer rate of 1.5gb/s. SATA is now the newest standard for hard drives.When you buy new hard disc,you should always choose the SATA interface hard drive.Note that your computer mainboard also need to have SATA ready port to use a SATA hard disc.However, we can still find many IDE (or "integrated drive electronics") devices instead which also refered to as PATA, or "Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment".*_*This Hardware Tips Bought to you By:http://hardwareonthespot.blogspot.com
IDE drives are yet slower then sata, and require a different installation method. For high performance drives used on servers, there is an SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) as well. It's not compatible with a standard motherboard without the addition of a PCI RAID controller that supports SCSI devices.
#2.Capacity: 1TB is very commond and affordable nowadays.If you been told the hard disc has 1tb, or 1024gb of storage, what you will actually get is about 936gb instead. This is because hard drives manufacturers choose to define their measurements of data differently then the whole rest of the computer world. To them, data is measured in increments of 1000. So they define 1kb as 1000b, and 1mb as 1000 kb, etc, instead of using them in increments of 1024 like your computer does. Still, every company does it, and there is no way of getting around it.
#3.RPM: Stands for "rotations per second". Your hard drive platter spins when accessing and writing data, much like a DVD or CD does in a burner. Most hard drives now operate at 7200 rpm. The faster the rotations, the faster the hard drive can access data. Today, 5400rpm hard drives are still fairly common, especially in Macs. Western Digital makes "raptors" which spin at 10000rpm, and there are some ultra performance drives that rotate at 15000 rpm. These tend to be very expensive though, and lack good capacity.
#4.Cache: The device cache of the hard drive is used to store data while it is doing whatever the hard drive is doing. It is faster then the paging files, and closer to the device then RAM. The hard drive cache has a small impact on how fast the hard drive is. Bigger drives tend to have larger caches.
#5.Average Seek Time: This is supposed to be how long it takes for the hard drive to access the data on the disk. I will be the first to say though that this number is completely false. It is often much longer then that. Usually, especially with larger files on a high capacity drive like this one, the hard drive will have to seek the disk more then once to retrieve all the data. In hard disk drive tests it is not uncommon to see drives score an average seek time of double this. Still, all 7200rpm drives are listed with this seek time, no matter what it really may be for realistic circumstances.
#6.Average Latency: How long it takes for the drive to kick up and start doing what you computer has told it to do. Like seek times, it often takes longer then what it is listed for. Most hard drive manufactures will list their latency at 4.17ms.
#7.Form Factor: The size of the hard drive, or how big it is. This one is the standard 3.5", very common in desktops and roughly the size of a thin journal or paper back book. 2.5" is also a common form factor that is usually for hard drives used in laptops.
Lastly like i always said ,check on their warranty terms,if anything goes wrong make sure you are able to return it and have the tech support if there is an incompatibility issue.This Hardware Tips Bought to you By:http://hardwareonthespot.blogspot.com/
You might also need to know:
What should you do when your hard disc is"down"
What is Raid Data Recovery.
How to Choose Between External Storage And Internal Storage Drives
