Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
RecommendedFDDbrands
If you need an FDD, any brand is fine.
HardDrive
It's easy to choose a good hard drive. Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba
(notebook drives only), and Western Digital produce drives at similar price
points for any given size and type of drive.
Compatibility is not an issue for hard drives. Hard drives are plug-and-play de-
vices. Any recent hard drive will coexist peacefully with any other recent hard
drive or optical drive, regardless of manufacturer.
Use the following guidelines when you choose a hard disk:
• Hard drives are available in standard ATA (
Parallel ATA
or
PATA
) and
Serial
ATA
(
SATA
) interfaces. PATA drives are obsolescent and are suitable only
for upgrading older systems that lack SATA interfaces. For a new system,
choose a drive that supports the SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface. A few newer
premium models support the more recent SATA 6.0 Gb/s interface, but
even the fastest hard drives are incapable of saturating a SATA 3.0 Gb/s
interface, so the SATA 6.0 Gb/s interface is really just marketing hype.
• Although it's tempting to buy the highest-capacity drive available, high-
capacity drives often cost more per gigabyte than midrange drives, and
the highest-capacity drives are often slower than midrange models.
Decide what performance level and capacity you need, and then buy a
drive that meets those requirements. Typically, you can choose the model
based on cost per gigabyte. However, you may need to buy the largest
drive available despite its higher cost per gigabyte and slower perfor-
mance, simply to conserve drive bays and SATA ports.
• Choose a 7,200 RPM SATA drive for a general-purpose system. 10,000 RPM
drives cost more than 7,200 RPM models, are not all that much faster, and
are much noisier and hotter-running than 7,200 RPM models.
• Get a model with larger buffer/cache if it doesn't cost much more. Some
drives are available in two versions that differ only in buffer size. One
might have a 16 MB buffer and the other a 32 MB buffer. It's worth paying
a few extra dollars for the larger buffer.
Recommendedharddrivebrands
We've used many desktop hard drives from all four companies that currently
make them, not to mention drives from another dozen or two companies that
have fallen by the wayside over the years. We usually install
Seagate
(
http://
www.seagate.com
) drives, because they are fast, quiet, cool-running, reli-
able, and competitively priced.
Western Digital
(
http://www.wdc.com
)
went
through a very bad patch a few years ago, with high out-of-the-box and in-use
failure rates. For years, we wouldn't even consider installing a Western Digital
drive. Fortunately, Western Digital has since addressed its quality problems
and now produces reliable models across the full range of capacities and per-
formance levels. We still seldom use Western Digital drives, though, because
