Fully loaded: EYO’s guide to PC storage

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All the bits and bytes travelling through your computer need a place to live,
and they're getting greedier by the minute. We explain what to look for
when upgrading your computer's storage subsystem.

As our computing demands grow in sophistication, so to does our need for storage
space. While computers started out life as word processing machines, they're
now used as repositories for our family photos, music collections, and movie
archives, etc. Not only that, but the resolution and quality of this photo and
video ontent are also increasing, which results in greater file sizes.

Can you see the trend here? Storage has undoubtedly become a critical consideration
when building a PC, and this doesn't look to be changing any time soon.

But for all the data we've got stored on our PCs, we also need somewhere
to back it up so we're not left weeping in the event of a PC meltdown.
It's also handy to be able to show off our collections to friends and
family. The solution? An external or portable storage drive.

Suffice it to say, it's likely you'll need to upgrade your storage
subsystem in the near future, and this guide should put you on track to making
an informed purchase.

The theory on internal storage

As you may well know, internal storage for your desktop computer comes in three
main flavours: Parallel ATA (also known as IDE), Serial ATA (SATA) and SCSI.
SCSI's uses are limited outside of the corporate enterprise, so let's
concentrate on IDE and SATA for the purposes of this article.

SATA is the successor to IDE and is more attractive for a number of reasons,
which we'll explain shortly.

For identification purposes, IDE hard drives are those that use fat ribbon
cables to transmit data between the disk and your computer, while SATA drives
use far thinner cabling. This is where the first advantage of SATA comes into
play – the thinner cables mean you'll get better airflow throughout
your PC chassis, which in turn results in lower temperatures and greater system
stability.

SATA can also transfer data at a faster rate. Most SATA drives can operate
at a theoretical maximum throughput speed of 300MB/sec (although the earliest
models are 150MB/sec), whereas the IDE standard maxes out at 133MB/sec. That
said, if you tend not to run storage-intensive applications such as audio/video
encoding, you may not notice a huge performance benefit when switching from
IDE to SATA.

Finally, a word of warning: before running out and purchasing a SATA drive,
you'll need to ensure your computer's motherboard has a set of SATA
ports. This shouldn't be an issue, as most new machines do. You'll
also need to check if your power supply has a SATA power cable and, if not,
you should purchase a Molex-to-SATA power adaptor (EYO stocks these).

Internal Storage: What is out there

Before buying a hard drive, you'll have to decide whether speed or capacity
is most important to you.

If capacity is what you're after, the largest hard drive stocked by EYO
is Seagate's Barracuda 750GB (635.58*), which may appear to be expensive
at first glance, but it's actually quite a bargain when you consider that
you're paying around 85 cents per GB. Another drive that's worth
a look is Western Digital's 500GB drive ($375.10), which is priced even
cheaper at 75 cents per GB.

But if you're a speed demon, Western Digital's Raptor drives are
where it's at. This is because they run at a spindle speed of 10,000RPM,
which means that the data on the hard disk's platters can be accessed
at a quicker speed, resulting in much speedier application load and response
times. By comparison, most conventional hard drives run at 7200RPM or even 5400RPM.

The Raptor drives comes in three flavours – 150GB ($401.72), 74GB ($258.50)
and 36GB ($175.56) – which means you're paying around $2.70, $3.50
and $4.90 per GB respectively. The Raptor is well worth the money if maximum
performance is what you're after.

Further, it may be a good idea to combine the Raptor with a higher capacity
drive, using the Raptor as your primary hard drive for application storage and
the high capacity drive as a dumping ground for your huge multimedia files.

All of the drives mentioned above are SATA, but if you don't have SATA
ports on your computer, IDE equivalents of most of them (except the Raptor)
can be bought from EYO for around the same price.

External Storage

Although it may seem illogical, external storage devices continue to shrink
in physical size, whilst their capacities and available features are on the
rise.

Seagate's Pushbutton 750GB drive and Western Digital's My Book
500GB drive is one of the largest external offerings we've seen, and enables
users to backup the entire contents of their computer to the drive at the push
of a button. Maxtor's One Touch II series (priced between $219.93 and
$916.99) also offers this quick and easy backup functionality, and comes in
capacities up to 1TB (approximately 1000GB).

Aside from the ability to make convenient backups, another feature you should
look for in an external storage solution is an Ethernet port. These are found
on LaCie's d2 series and Maxtor's Network Shared Storage series
and Western Digital's Netcenter range which can be hooked up to your home
or office network to be accessed by all networked computers.

Most portable storage devices use the USB 2.0 connection, but some older computers
still only offer USB 1.0 ports. USB 2.0 drives will still work with USB 1.0
ports (and vice-versa), but they won't be operating at their maximum speed.
Also, some external drives use the Firewire (also known as IEEE1394) connection,
and if you're considering purchasing one of these you'll need to
make sure your PC offers a Firewire port.

Do-IT-Yourself

Finally, if you're handy with a screwdriver, you may want to purchase
an empty external hard drive enclosure and install your own 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch
internal hard drive. These solutions typically aren't as elegant as a
ready-made external hard drive, but they can be a cheaper way to go about securing
a portable storage solution.

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