[mws30]

Well my 40 gig is just about out of space.need advice on Brand,Size,and any other good advice on the subject
Thank you Marvin

[Hybr!d]

I like Western Digital drives, they're the only brand I have used that haven't gone to pieces on me.

As for size that really depends on your needs and budget mate.

[stugster]

40GB is nothing these days.

Seagate, Western Digital, and Maxtor are all good manufacturers.

First question, is it an external USB drive, a PATA (IDE) or a SATA (serial) drive you want?

An External USB usually connects to a mains power supply and then to your computer via USB. They come in all shapes and sizes, with roughly 320GB costing £75. They CAN NOT be used to boot Windows or most operating systems (well they can, but it's complicated).

A PATA (IDE) is the - now old - name for the hard drive you'll likely have already. It'll have a flat ribbon of cables going into a long rectangular slot on both the motherboard and Hard Disk. As these are older in technology, the price has fallen dramatically over the last 6-12 months. For 320GB you'd be looking at approximately £60.

SATA is the new technology. It's faster, and apparently more reliable. If you can (if your motherboard supports it that is to say) you would be more beneficial getting one of these. They come in much higher capacities, and are extremely cheap. For 320GB you're talking about £50.

To be totally honest with you however, if your computer is running a 40GB hard drive, there's a good chance it is reasonably old fashioned (by a few years). With the recent release of Dual Core, and multi-cored processing power, you would not do so badly purchasing a new computer altogether for your money.

Dell are offering this specification at the moment:

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dells...=D09V02A&s=bsd

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E4400 Processor (2.0GHz,800MHz,2MB cache)
Vista Business OR XP Professional
160GB SATA Hard Disk
Keyboard
Mouse
2048MB (that's 2GB!) DDR SDRAM (Memory)
16X DVD +/- RW Drive (to copy DVDs)

For £311.45. All included, VAT and Delivery :)

Just make sure you alter the package as above, you remove 19" monitor and the Warranty support is changed to 1 year base.

I've also been told, if you phone them and ask them to do a deal, they'll throw in delivery for free (so subtract £60.00!)

Voilas :)


P.S. More about Hard Drives here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Manufacturers
And more about SERIAL (SATA) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA

[mws30]

Thank you for the fast reply
i would also think that the bigger the cashe the better?
Thank you Marvin

[stugster]

Exactly, the bigger the cache, the faster your computer will be, as the computer can send the data to the drive and then get on with other things straight away.

The best analogy I can think of at this time of night would be a printer.

Every printer has memory (or cache). If it didn't the computer would send the data (but only at the speed of the printer). So for the time it took to print out the document your computer would be unavailable to use.

Instead, the computer sends a big chunk of the document (probably all of it) to the printers cache, and the printer then confirms the receipt of all the data, and goes about printing your document. The computer processor can then go on with more important things :)

Exact same idea with the HDD. The HDD is much slower than the processor of a computer, and thus has cache to prevent an unfair share of the CPU.

[andyf]

Today you can get HD in TB ( tetrabyte ) of capicity also rates are getting cheaper day-by-day:)
Along with cache you should also look for type of HD ( SATA or IDE ) and try to get maximum rpm ( rotation per min )

I have 80GB Seagate for my home PC and at my Hosting business We use SATA drives on our servers with good speed of 7500 rpm. We also provide SAS drives on some of our high configuration servers which have a speed of 10,000 rpm which are best for handling thousands of request.