3 Things You Should Know Before Buying A Hard Drive

Whenever we tend to buy something whether it is a wallet, watch, or some gadget, we do some research regarding the object. When the thing which you want to buy is hard drive then a lot of things you should check out before wasting your precious earned money on some worthless hard drive. So before buying a hard drive you should always keep these things in mind.

Size

I think many of you aren’t aware of the difference between the drive size and the size which your computer shows. For example if you are going to buy a 500GB hard drive from any manufacturer then the actual size of that drive will be around 476GB (approx). The reason behind this marketing approach used by the manufactures is quite simple they use 1000 instead of 1024.

We know that 1024KB=1MB, 1024MB=1GB

The manufacturers use 1000KB=1MB, 1000MB=1GB

So the 500GB hard drive is actually= (500x1000x1000)/(1024×1024)=476GB (approx). In my case it is 465GB (approx).

If we talk about a hard drive larger in size say 1TB, then the actual size will be 953GB (approx).

Now if you want to buy 1TB hard drive then go for it, don’t buy two 500GB hard drive as you will get less space compared to a single hard drive.

1TB=953GB(actual size), and two 500GB=476+476=952GB (Lesser by fraction but sometimes less is more).

Speed

Speed means RPM (Revolution Per Minute). A hard drive with more RPM is better as it can fetch/read and store/write data at a faster speed. Still you shouldn’t be more concerned about it until and unless hard drive plays a major role in your life. From the point of view of a gamer I always go for more RPM, but for other users I prefer anything above or around 7200 RPM is good enough. SSD (Solid State Drive) is better than ATA

Interface

Interface is as important as speed, as two of them are co-related. Some of the most used interfaces for hard drives are:

ATA/PATA transfer rate = 133 MB/s (Max)

SATA transfer rate = 157 – 300 MB/s (Max) (Though theoretically it can give roughly the double of the maximum transfer rate)

SSD transfer rate = over 300 MB/s... via[techyfuzz]