Cheap hard disks
A hard drive is where you store all your "long-term" data. This includes program files, music, pictures, and anything else that you want to keep stored on your computer. This is different from RAM, which is considered a "volatile" medium and does not store data for the "long-term". That's one of the reasons why RAM is usually under 1 gigabyte (GB) while hard drives can be well over 100 GB.
Big hard drive sizes are very common today. The main reason for this is that the prices have declined so much over the past few years and the amount of data people need to store has gone up. These days people are running servers from their computers, storing thousand of songs for their Ipods, archiving videos and creating photo albums. To store all that data, you need a big hard drive.
Price for a one gigabyte of storage has fallen from $7/GB in 1999, to $3.50/GB in January, 2001, to as low as $.50/GB today.
Good hard drives should have features as follows:
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< 9.0 ms access speed (or faster) - allows you to access and retrieve files quicker. Essential for quick load times in games and office applications
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7200 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) - Attributes to the fast access speed
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SATA or Ultra ATA/100 interface - Serial ATA (SATA) drives are the new future of hard drives and you'll want to get it if you can. If not try to get at least an Ultra ATA/100 hard drive. Both of these drives will provide high data transfer rates that lead to fast data copying and loading.
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2-8 MB buffer - Having a bigger buffer allows you to transfer data faster by loading data in bigger chunks.
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MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 750,000 hours - Vital information if you plan on using your computer for extended periods.
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3 year warranty
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Reliable manufacturer home page with technical support and FTP site.
You can usually find these specifications either on the retail box or on the manufacturer's website. Remember though if you are looking for a hard drive for a laptop computer, you will have to sacrifice size and speed for a cooler and battery saving hard drive.
The manufacturers I would recommend are Western Digital and Seagate. I have a 80 gig Western Digital hard drive and am very satisfied with it. I would not recommend hard disks that are smaller than 60 gigabytes in size because the price difference between that and higher capacity models are very small in terms of the space you can gain. Today's programs also take much more space than they used to.
Seagate hard drives are renowned not only for their excellent performance but their quiet operation. If you're looking to build a home theater PC or similar quiet environment computer, look into Seagate hard drives.
Listed below are some of the Hard Drives that would be my recommendation.
BUDGET PC/BUSINESS PC
Don't buy below 80GB hard disk even though we are talking about budget PC here. The price difference between 60 and 80 GB hard disk is so small (only around $5) that it's simply not worth trying to save a few dollars and buying a smaller hard drive.
Western Digital Caviar 80GB / 7200 / 8MB / 8.9 / ATA-100 EIDE Hard Drive
MULTIMEDIA PC/GAMING
PC/HOME THEATER
You will need a hard disk of at least 160 GB. Preferably even more. You will probably work with large media files and a big hard drive is required. As games are starting to ship on DVDs, that means that it will take up almost 9 GB per game. You can see how quickly space can be eaten up if you play games.
Seagate 160GB / 7200 / 2MB / 9.0 / ATA-100 EIDE Hard Drive.
Most 160GB hard drives cost less than $90 which is unbelievably cheap for this much storage. Therefore aim for a bigger hard drive as you will get more for your money. Also keep in mind that if you want a lot of storage, you don't have to use just 1 hard drive to get that space. You can install more than 1 hard drive on most computers and that'll allow you to split the load among multiple hard drives.