Hello, Agent Alex Blower here again. I'm back here today to talk about 'hard disk drives' or 'hard drives', 'hard disks', 'HDD's' or whatever you know them by. They are the rectangular shaped black and silver device that is usually located in the lower front of your computer case. They hold your Windows installation and all your important documents, photos, music, videos etc. Your PC won't run without one! For this article I'll refer to them as hard drives.
First I'll cover some of the hard drives basic terms. Hard drives have for a while now had their capacities quoted in Gigabytes (or GB). We are now at the stage where hard drives have hit the 1000GB mark so now these 1000GB hard drives are referred to as one Terabyte (or TB).
You see, inside a hard drive is a series of small metallic disks (platters) which hold your data. The number of platters inside your hard drive depends on the capacity of the drive but ranges from just a single platter up to five. For example, Hitachi make a 250GB drive which has the entire 250GB on a single platter. Seagate make a 500GB drive which has two platters with 250GB on each. Hitachi make a 1TB drive with five platters so 200GB on each.
This brings me on to 'areal density'. Areal density is the total of the drives capacity divided by the number of platters. The higher the areal density of a drive, the better 'usually' the performance. Going on the above rule, the Seagate 500GB drive should perform better than the Hitachi 1TB drive as the Seagate has a higher areal density.
Something else to be aware of is that hard drives come in two different interface varieties. You need to know what type of interface your motherboard uses so as not to buy the wrong type of hard drive. Today's hard drives use an interface called Serial-ATA (or SATA) whereas older drives use an interface called Parallel-ATA (or IDE or PATA). If your motherboard is over about 5 years old you will probably need an IDE drive whereas if your motherboard is only a few years old it may accept the newer SATA drives.
Anyway, Samsung might not be the first name you think of when talking about hard drives (maybe Western Digital or Seagate) but Samsung have quietly been gaining ground over the past few years and now have a new range out called Spinpoint F1. They are not called F1 for nothing! They are fast!
There are eleven models in the range but the one I will talk about today is the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ. The reason for this is that it is the fastest and largest capacity drive in the range weighing in at 1 TB. Even more incredible is that this drive manages it's 1 TB capacity on just three platters. This drive has a huge 1TB of storage but spread across only three platters giving it an areal density of approximately 334GB per platter, the highest seen so far. This helps the Samsung to not only allow for huge storage but also makes it a very fast drive. It scores 5.9 in Windows Vista Home Premium, which for those who don’t know is the highest score possible.
As a rough guide to what 1 TB means to you, this drive will hold up to 285,700 photos or up to 250,000 mp3's or up to 120 hours of HD video or up to 440 hours of DVD quality video! Amazing, eh?!
This drive was costing about £190 when it came out but just this week several online retailers are selling this drive for £100 which makes it a real bargain. However, if you do not need all this storage capacity, then it's little brother, the 750GB Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ is available for around £70 and is almost as fast.
Needless to say that with this much storage you will probably want another similar capacity drive for your all important backups. If you need help choosing a backup solution or installing one of these as a replacement to your current drive then Geek Squad is here for you. Please call 0800 049 6190 for assistance and pricing.
So, I hope I have given you a couple of very good hard drives to consider for your next upgrade.
Be sure to check back soon for another instalment! Until then, this is Agent Alex Blower signing off...
