What you should know before you make a hard disk upgrade!
- You may run out of space as a result of demanding and memory hungry new software applications. This also may include gigabyte-eating graphics, digitized audio, video files or large databases.
- Though competition among manufacturers and technological improvements means lower prices and higher capacity for hard disk storage.
- To achieve performance improvement with faster disk access and improved data transfers rates in order to meet today’s games and software applications plus the faster PC processing speed of desktops or laptops.
What capacity should I upgrade a hard disk to?
If you are thinking of making a hard disk upgrade procedure, analyze your storage needs on your current hard disk by matching it with your current data size before you buy and install a new one. If you intend of using multimedia intensive applications to work on your PC then the application place heavy demands on the hard disk drive to perform correctly. As a rule of thumb multiply your present storage size by a factor of 20 in order to meet the new computer need and to receive the full the capacity of the new hard drive upgrade. For serious multimedia users the multiplying factor may be 100.
Specifications to look for in a new upgrade of a hard disk.
Remember that moving large files in and out of RAM, demand high performance hard drives.
Here are some of the key parameters for disk drive performance:
Spindle Speed. This is defined as the speed with which the data platter inside the drive spins. Nowadays most manufacturers offer drive models in both 5400-rpm and 7200-rpm versions. Higher rpm speeds provide both higher transfer rates and faster random access to data.
Area density refers to the data amount which can be stored on each of the hard disk platters. Area density is a measure in two-dimensional defined as:
Recording density (bit density) X track density.
The outcome is computed in bits per square inch(BPSI).
Area density is also linked to the drives transfer rate specifications.
In general the higher area density of the drive the higher transfer rates it will have.
However, the improvement of the drive’s transfer rate is often the result of the increased bit density against the track density.
Data transfer rate. For people working with large files this is the most important specification to lookout for. Expressed in megabytes per second (MBps), this specification indicates how fast the head can stream data out of the platter surface during sustained reads of megabytes of data stored on contiguous tracks.
Interface Transfer Rate. This is often an overrated performance specification that the hard disk manufacturers use in their marketing. The real performance of hard disk is instead primarily as described above based in the internal characteristics, not on the interface. The crucial factor is that the interface rate must be kept higher than the drive's maximum data transfer rate in order to prevent data loss.
Today's IDE / ATA / SATA / SCSI disk drives and controllers are often sold as "Ultra ATA/66" or "Ultra ATA/100". The "66" and "100" is the specifications in MB/s of the interface transfer rate.
There are also other specifications such as Seek Time and Track Access Time, which are of less significance as hard drive parameters. The above specifications should be checked closely when you upgrade an HDD unit when used in speed-critical applications.
The main reason that upgrading a new hard disk can drastically improve performance of a computer system is the fact that being a mechanical component utility, a hard disk is thousand times slower than the CPU and its RAM memory.
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