There are a few questions you will have to answer before you purchase your new drive.
1. How will I determine what drive will work in my computer?
2. Is this drive replacing the boot drive or is to be for storage?
3. Does cache/buffer size, RPM, access and seek time make a difference?
4. What brand hard drive should I buy?
Will it work.
Most any hard drive from any manufacturer will work.
The data storage size is one factor that could be an issue.
Some older computers and operating systems have size limitations.
The best way to determine if this will be a factor is to go to
your
motherboard manufacturer’s website and find the limitations
for you motherboard.
There could possibly be a BIOS update that would allow for bigger
disks.
Boot or storage drive.
Does it make a difference?
If your new drive is going to be for storage only, it is really
not necessary to go with the fastest drive because it is just
going to be sitting there until you decide to write data to
it.
If the new drive is going to be for booting the operating system,
it is better to have a faster drive for better performance.
Your operating system is always accessing the files it is using.
The faster the drive the better the performance
and the better your overall experience will be.
RPM Cache/Buffer Seek and Access time
Yes, these things make a difference.
RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) is how fast the the platters storing
the
data are turning. The higher the RPM , the faster data is can
be wrote or accessed.
Cache/Buffer is temporary storage space for data that is accessed
frequently.
An application firsts checks the hard drive cache/buffer for data,
then it will
access the platters. It is a lot faster to access data stored
in memory than to search
on the physical platters.
Seek time is the time in milliseconds it takes to find random
data stored
on the platters.
Access time is seek time plus the time it takes for the heads
to come
into position for reading and writing.
The lower the access time the faster your drive will perform.
What Brand
That is a tough question to answer. In my opinion
the best way to determine this is to search hard drive benchmark
results on google
and compare the different brands with the overall results. Some
sites, people will say a certain brand is junk because they
have had a bad experience with that brand, and this experience
could have been with older technology or even with a hand me
down.
You want the opinions of people who working with many brands,quantity
and knowledge of newest technology.
Hopefully in the near future I will have some
benchmarks for you to review.