Windows 7 - How to Buy a Hard Drive: An Essential Guide

Do you need gigabytes or performance? Laptop upgrades or a screaming new gaming PC? We walk you through what you need to know to pick the right storage solution for your PC.

Storage. Always needed, often overlooked.

Often lost in the buzz surrounding the latest DirectX 11 GPUs and hexacore CPUs is the ability to actually store and retrieve your stuff. Your applications, games, photographs, digital music and everything else lives on your hard drive. But that boring old rotating magnetic disk just doesn’t seem exciting or high tech – even though the technology in a hard drive is actually pretty incredible.

One technology that has made storage a little sexier is SSDs – solid state drives based on flash memory technology. But SSDs aren’t a perfect solution, as we’ll see shortly. We’ll cover the gamut of storage options for your OS and apps to help you better understand what storage solution is best for your needs. (Note that we’re not going to talk about optical storage, which really is secondary these days.)

We’ll first touch briefly on technology and jargon, then look at several different scenarios, and try to focus on what storage options might be appropriate and cost effective. But first, let’s talk tech. We’ll first briefly discuss hard drives, then take a quick look at SSDs.