You want buy a new computer, but you cannot which hard disk to buy ? Or you want to buy a new hard disk for your computer ? So, this article is done for you. It will describe all the things you must be careful of when choosing a hard disk.
1. Introduction
The hard disk is the element who enables you to store data of your computer. The operating system, your programs, your games and your documents will be stored in this device. So be careful not to stifle your computer choosing an inadequate hard disk.
So you have to control some criterias, like the capacity or the rotation speed.
Hard Disk
2. Capacity
The capacity of the hard disk is the quantity of informations it can store. This is the first choice critera, people often search some storage space. But this capacity depends of your needs. The capacity is calculated in Go (Gigaoctets) and the price is directly depending of the capacity.
For informations, 1 Go = 1024 Mo = 1 048 576 Ko = 1 073 741 824 octets. It now common to find hard disks with more than one To (Teraoctets). 1 To = 1024 Go.
To evaluate the necessary capacity, here are the capacity for some applications or files :
- A program : Between 10 and 500 Mo
- A video game : Between 200 Mo and several Go
- A Word document of several pages : 50 Ko
- A song in MP3 : 3 to 7 Mo
- A numeric photography : 1 Mo
- A film (DivX format) : 700 Mo
- Windows XP : 5 to 10 Go
- Windows Vista : 10 to 20 Go
- Linux : 5 to 10 Go
Of course, this is only estimations, but that can allow you to make an idea of what you need.
It’s not usefull to buy a enormous hard disk when you have only some Word documents to store. The sellers will often try to sell you the biggest hard disks. So keep in mind your needs.
For example, a 1 To hard disk can contains :
- More than 1400 movies in DivX format or
- 1 million of photos in medium format or
- 200’000 songs in MP3 format or
- Several tens of millions of pages in Word format
So you can see that this kind of hard disk is often not necessary. I don’t say that’s a bad idea but it’s a good thing to estimate your need before choosing an enormous (or too small). It’s not really interesting to use moyen for space that we’ll never use.