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What does it do? |
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allows you to write any type of data and file. |
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Quality to consider before purchasing one |
The Hard Drive is the most important and delicate part of the entire
computer. In fact, if you break any other device you can replace it;
but if the Hard Drive breaks, all your valuable data are lost
(unless of course you have backed up your information or
make use of expensive organisations specialised in recovering
data).
Therefore, the choice of a good Hard Drive is of vital importance.
The parameters to consider are essentially two: reliability and
speed, reliability definetely coming first. Other parameters to
consider are compatibility (no problems with other mother boards or
other various sort of conflicts) and noise (if your pc is quiet, the
noise of the Hard Drive when inactive will stand out a lot).
At present you can find Hard Disk such as EIDE, S-ATA and SCSI (the
latter are the best ones from all points of view. However, they are
not so popular as they are very expensive and need an additional
controller).
The standard EIDE is certainly reliable, even if it has some
limitations. The standard S-ATA (Serial Ata) is quite recent and
tries to overcome the various limitations typical of EIDE (faster,
no problem with jumper configuration in case of more than one hard
drives being installed, smaller cables and so forth). At present
(2004) there can be some incompatibility of S-ATA Hard Drive with
older S-ATA motherboards, or with power supplies of low quality.
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The average cost for an EIDE Hard Drive (or S-ATA) is between 40 and
120 USD depending on the model and capacity (...and vendor. Prices
do vary from vendor to vendor). Obviously, if you want a HD with a
superior capacity, it will be more expensive (on average, 0.5 - 1 $ per
GB). |
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Brands to keep in mind (buy hard drive or hard drive sale) |
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1) Western Digital (very reliable; rather noisy when inactive)
2) Maxtor (very good reliability and assistance)
3) Seagate (fast and quiet)
You can also consider the following:
Hitachi and Samsung, even if at present they are still not on the
same level as the others just mentioned above (especially the first
two) |
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