Hard Drives
The purpose of the hard drive in a computer is to store all the data. It will store your photos, movies and the operating system. When buying a hard drive, there are four things that you will need to know. The first thing to know is the connection type. Hard drives for the systems that I have been talking about have either one of two connections: DIE or SATA. IDE drives are older and have been beginning to be phased out. They are connected to the motherboard with a large ribbon cable. On the other hand, SATA drives are a more current technology and are connected to the motherboard by a smaller cable.
The second thing that a buyer should be looking at is the RPM of the drive. The higher the RPM, the faster the drive is. Currently the fastest IDE drive is 7200 RPM and the fastest SATA drive is 15,000 RPM.
The third thing that you should be looking for is the cache. The higher the cache, the better.
The last thing to think about is the size. The more gigabites that a drive has, the more information that the drive is able to store. Drives range from under a gigabyte to about 500 gigabytes. If you need more space than one drive you can add more; you can add as many drives as your motherboard and PSU will support. In fact, if you intend to run RAID, you will need at least two drives.
This is an SATA hard drive.
This is an IDE hard drive.
This is an SATA cable.
This is an IDE cable.
