Best Internal Hard Drives of 2021

Internal Hard Drive Buying Guide

An Internal Hard Drive is a hardware component that stores all your data for your PC. It includes documents, pictures, music, videos, programs, application preferences and many more. A PC relies on its hard drive to store everything it needs to operate. Hard drive capacity has always steadily increased its capacity while reducing its cost and physical size. Constant work and research have proven that what is the standard today will be replaced by something better tomorrow. This guide will try and help you better understand what an Internal Hard Drive is if you are looking to buy one.

Benefits of Internal Hard Drives

Always connected to your computer

Internal hard drives are always connected to your computer. Therefore, regular scheduling of backups requires less effort.

Cost-Efficient

Internal Hard Drives are cost-efficient compared to other types that exist in the market.

Replaceable

It is easily replaced and upgraded to keep your PC running.

Drawbacks

While internal hard drives have their benefits, they also have a few drawbacks. They are not portable and must remain fixed inside one computer, unlike an external hard drive. They also require installation if they are replaced or upgraded, which means the person installing the hard drive must be comfortable with the inner workings of the computer.

Factors to Consider before Buying Internal Hard Drives

Drive size

This is a very subject topic. It depends on what you need to do. If you simply need to transfer a limited number of files then a smaller drive would suffice. But if you want to back up your entire computer and several other computers or you want to use it as a storage for large amounts of video and audio files then you will want a larger Hard Drive size. New models range from several hundred GB (gigabytes) to several TB (Terabytes). Year by year storage sizes has been increasing with new and improved technology.

Drive Speed

The spin speed or RPM (rotation per minute) is what you need to pay attention to. The faster a disk spins, the faster your computer will process and find what you are looking for. So, a 7,200 RPM hard drive would be faster than a 5,400 RPM hard drive. However, you will rarely find any difference between the two unless you are working with large files and applications.

HDD or SSD?

The recent trend is that SSD (solid-state drives) are replacing HDD (hard disk drives) due to the high-performance capacity of SSD. It gives faster access times and lower latency. Although SSD is becoming popular the HHD is still used more due to the higher cost of SSD and the faster speed of SSD might not be needed by many. However, more devices are starting to be shipped with SSD instead of HDD as it is more reliable and stable especially for laptops.

Interface

The way a Hard Drive interacts with a processor has undergone several changes over the years. Each new change has drastically improved the transfer speeds and ease at which the motherboard handles the drive. The current standard interface is SATA (serial advanced technology attachment).

Price

You will notice that there is a wide range of hard drive prices for devices and it is very hard to tell them apart. So, it’s up to you to decide which factors are most relevant to you.

There is one way to determine value is to divide the drive’s price by its storage capacity to get its price-per-gigabyte.

Conclusion

The most important question is to ask yourself, “What do I need?”. Depending on your needs you can best choose what to purchase but due to the little differences, you will hardly notice any of them in your day to day use except the choice between HDD and SSD which will directly affect the speed of your system but also there is a huge price difference the two.