Upgrading your Hard Drive: Space has never been so cheap!

It seems computer storage is something we can never get enough of. With the accumulation of files by the day, extra hard drive space is becoming more and more of a luxury. Thankfully the price we pay per megabyte of space has dropped considerably! We can now have that extra space without having to spend huge amounts of money. Seagate have long proven to develop reliable and fast hard drives. Their Pata and Sata Barracuda Hard Drive series are no exception!

Up until recently, Parallel ATA (PATA) have been the dominant hard drive format. Now Serial ATA (SATA) is really making its mark. There are a few advantages with Sata hard drives. They transport their data much quicker thanks to a larger bandwidth. The even newer SataII drives have increased the speed even more. The data cables are also much thinner, making them easier to install and allowing air to pass through the computer more efficiently to allow for better PC cooling. You also don't need to worry about Master and Slave settings. With PATA setups, two hard drives can share the one data cable. To ensure this you need to assign the drive at the end of the data cable as 'Master', whilst the one at the middle of the cable is the 'Slave'. However only the newer motherboards will be compatible with Sata drives, so before upgrading ensure yours will meet the job.

What has astounded me is the price drop in hard drives. A couple of years ago, 60GB was considered massive. Now it's not even worth a laugh at! If you are buying a new hard drive don't consider anything less than 120GB. At only $140 dollars for a 120GB Sata drive, it's an absolute bargain! If that's not big enough for you, try a 400GB monster! Not only for space, but also the speed transfer of data in the newer drives make them more attractive. We mustn't forget that our computer's performance will be greatly affected by the hard drives ability to output data to the motherboard. We often don't think of the hard drive as a bottlenecking source.

There's one final point that I feel is really important. Given the size of the hard drives now, it should be a common practice to partition your drive. In other words effectively split your one hard drive into two. Assign the smaller section on your hard drive to running the Windows operating system, whilst have the larger storage sector accommodating your data files. The added advantage of this is that when you come to format your hard drive and re-install Windows (something we all should do at least once a year to optimise performance), you won't need to touch your important data files as they are safely stored on the other partition.

Order your Hard Drive at Mr.Gadget today!