The good news is that hard drive shopping is not that difficult. In fact, there is a lot of flexibility and room! As long as you follow these guidelines, you don’t have to worry about buying the wrong hard drive and losing your money.



All hard drives are dead. This is a fact in life, it is normal to buy a new one every few years, either replacing the old hard drive or using it as an additional backup drive. But there are many options, which kind of hard drive should you buy?

1. Hard disk drive and solid state drive

The absolute first decision you must make when purchasing a data storage drive is whether you need a solid state drive (SSD). Although SSD has the same functions as a traditional hard disk drive (HDD), it has some advantages and disadvantages.

SSDs are data drives that use flash instead of rotating metal disks in traditional HDDs. Think of it as a huge USB drive or SD card. But in any case, how important is this difference?

Well, there are benefits. First, SSDs can read and write data faster. Second, SSDs consume less power, saving energy and extending the battery life of laptops. Third, SSDs have no moving parts, so they do not generate noise and have a longer life.

2. Hard disk size and interface

Once you decide to use a hard drive and a solid state drive, you must choose a form factor. Fortunately, there are only two options, and the right choice depends primarily on your current settings.

There are two forms of data drives: 3.5-inch drives and 2.5-inch drives.

In traditional HDDs, data is stored on rotating metal disks, which means that more data is needed to expand the data capacity. For this reason, desktop hard drives are often 3.5 inches, typically up to 12 terabytes, while laptop hard drives are often 2.5 inches and typically have a maximum capacity of 4 terabytes.

On the other hand, SSDs can be made smaller because they do not require moving parts. Therefore, most SSDs come in a 2.5-inch form factor. What if you need to install the SSD into a 3.5-inch connector? The adapter is available.

In terms of connectivity, most modern consumer drives (HDD and SSD) use SATA connectors. Older hard drives created before the SATA standard are most likely to use the IDE connector. If you purchase an external hard drive, it will connect to your system via the USB port.

3. Hard Drive Specifications and Performance

Now that you know what drive to buy, it’s time to find the drive that best suits your needs. Here’s what you need to consider: storage capacity. HDDs come in a variety of sizes, and each drive has a capacity of 16TB due to physical limitations. On the other hand, SSDs are much smaller, reaching 60TB, but affordable consumer SSDs rarely exceed 4TB.

Transfer speed. The performance of consumer HDDs is determined by many factors, but the revolutions per minute (RPM) is an important factor. A higher RPM means faster transfer of data to and from the drive.

You can ignore the SATA speed of the drive. For example, modern drives may be listed as 3.0GB / s and 7200RPM. The first value is the SATA speed, which describes the theoretical maximum speed of the SATA connection. No hard disk can transfer data at this speed. However, the 7200RPM drive is always faster than the 5400RPM drive.

Cache space. When a hard disk needs to transfer data from one part of the drive to another, it utilizes a special area of ​​embedded memory called a cache or buffer.

Larger caches make data transfer faster because more information can be stored at once. Modern HDDs can have a cache size of 8MB to 256MB.

Interview time. Traditional hard drives have other performance-impacting factors, such as the time it takes the reader to position itself to read data from or write data to the drive.





4. The price and cost of the hard disk

When shopping, you will encounter a variety of hard drive prices for devices that look very similar in appearance. It’s up to you to decide which factors and features are most relevant to your needs, and then choose the hard drive that fits those needs.

That is, one way to determine value for money is to divide the price of the drive by its storage capacity to get a price per gigabyte.

Which one provides the best value? 6TB model. The price per gigabyte for 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 6TB models decreases as storage space increases. However, there are other drives that do not scale in price. So you have to be careful. Some drives cost more per gigabyte at higher capacity.

5. External hard drive and internal hard drive

The final consideration is whether the drive is installed in a desktop or laptop enclosure, or externally and connected to various devices. This is a simple decision, but let’s take a look at each of the pros and cons.

External drives are ideal for storage, backup and transfer. They are usually connected using USB 2.0, 3.0 or 3.1, and their maximum transfer speeds are 60MB / s, 625MB / s and 1,250MB / s. USB 3.1 is of course preferred, but not required unless you transfer hours of data back and forth every day.

The external hard drive is portable. Just unplug the USB plug and plug it in somewhere else. They can also be plugged into TV and media centers to play media directly.

6. Game hard drive: PlayStation, Xbox, PC

Your hard drive selection can have a major impact on game performance, which is why we always recommend using SSD for games. This applies to PC, Xbox One, Xbox One X, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 4 Slim, PlayStation 4 Pro or any newer console.

Since the SSD speed is much faster than the HDD speed, the game will start faster and load much faster between levels, stages and maps. Seriously, the difference between SSD and HDD for games is day and night. You will regret getting the hard drive!

7. Built-in and external hard drives for Mac

If you are using a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini or iMac, there are some extra considerations to be aware of when purchasing a hard drive.

Built-in Mac hard drive

The most important thing is that the Mac hard drive upgrade is almost a DIY project. You must disassemble the device to reach the internal drive, carefully replace it, and then put all the components back together. Even the simplest replacement takes at least an hour. This will also invalidate your warranty and any AppleCare insurance you may have.

External hard drive for Mac

For external drives, you have multiple connection options listed in order to increase data transfer speed: USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB 3.1, Thunderbolt 2, and Thunderbolt 3 (also known as USB Type-C). We recommend using USB 3.0 as the absolute minimum application.

Mac devices use Apple’s unique file system, so external hard drives should be formatted as HFS + (Mac OS Extended) or Apple File System (APFS) for optimal performance.

But please note that most non-Apple devices will not be able to read HFS+ or APFS drives! There are ways to read HFS+ on Windows, but APFS is so novel that compatibility is severely limited. The only format available for Mac and Windows is FAT32.