September 21, 2009

Another popular upgrade due to its ease and low-cost is replacing your existing hard drive with a higher-capacity drive. Unlike the memory your computer uses while processing requests (RAM), the memory on your hard drive is where you can store all of your files. Having a larger hard drive (or Hard Disk Drive, HDD), allows you to store more documents, music, movies, photos, or anything else you need, and can also give your computer a slight performance boost. To determine if you need a new, larger hard drive, double-click on your My Computer icon, then right-click on your C-Drive. Select "Properties" from the list that appears, and check out the graph showing your drive usage. The more blue you have, the more full your drive is. If you have less than about 25% left on your current drive, it is probably time to start thinking of an upgrade.

The most common sizes for hard drives these days are 80GB, 320 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB (equals 1,000 GB), and now they even have 1.5 or 2 TB drives! The capacity of your current drive and the things you use your computer for will help you determine a good size for your upgrade. If you save a lot of pictures, movies, or music for example, you might benefit from buying a large hard drive now that you can slowly fill up. You tend to get more memory for your money when you buy a larger drive, but there's no need to buy a huge drive you don't think you'll ever fill up.

While you can still find slower IDE drives, the standard these days is SATA. These plug into your motherboard with a cable like this (top), to sockets like this (middle), and then receive power from your power supply via a plug like this (bottom). Increasingly common these days are a new type of drive called "solid-state." Whereas traditional drives use spinning plates to access and store data, the new solid-state disks have no moving parts and access the information much like a thumb drive or data stick. This increases the durability of the drive and makes it less likely that the drive will fail under normal usage, and also delivers much faster data access. However, you will more than pay for these advantages if you purchase a solid-state disk, as they are considerably more expensive than their traditional counterparts.

Installation of your new drive is straightforward. A few screws will secure it in the drive bay and then it is simply plugged into the motherboard and power supply (Make sure the power supply is switched off and unplugged first!). If you don't have the space to install a second drive and are completely replacing your old drive, you will need to back up all of your data first, and then completely reinstall Windows onto your new drive.

While replacing or upgrading your hard drive is a fairly straightforward procedure, it is always best to have a trained professional help you out. Feel free to contact us if we can be of any assistance.

(HDD image courtesy of Asim18. SATA connector image used under the GNU Free Documentation License. SATA ports image used courtesy of Rudra. SATA power cable image courtesy of Ed_g2s.)