Once upon a time, buying a hard drive to work with your system was easy. Today, things are more complicated, with many types of drives available, offering differing levels of performance. Most modern motherboards will support more than one type.
For best performance, you may want to dump the old IDE PATA type drives and upgrade to SATA, which comes in several speeds from 1.5 Gb/s to 6 Gb/s. Obviously, the faster drives will also be more expensive. Some new computers also have eSATA connectors for attaching a SATA drive externally. Other options for attaching drives externally include USB and Firewire/IEEE 1394.
Slowdowns may be caused by installing programs or often-used files on slow external drives. If you must use external drives for such files, go with the latest version, such as USB 3.0 (which is up to four times faster than USB 2.0) or Firewire 800. If you don’t have ports to support the faster version, you can install a card to add support.
New Solid State Drives (SSDs), which generally connect via SATA, can often provide better performance than other drive types, but cost much more per GB of storage space. Windows 7 includes support for TRIM, which optimizes SSD performance. SCSI drives are still around, too, notably in the form of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) with super fast access times — but they’re expensive and noisy and used primarily for servers.
For best performance, you may want to dump the old IDE PATA type drives and upgrade to SATA, which comes in several speeds from 1.5 Gb/s to 6 Gb/s. Obviously, the faster drives will also be more expensive. Some new computers also have eSATA connectors for attaching a SATA drive externally. Other options for attaching drives externally include USB and Firewire/IEEE 1394.
Slowdowns may be caused by installing programs or often-used files on slow external drives. If you must use external drives for such files, go with the latest version, such as USB 3.0 (which is up to four times faster than USB 2.0) or Firewire 800. If you don’t have ports to support the faster version, you can install a card to add support.
New Solid State Drives (SSDs), which generally connect via SATA, can often provide better performance than other drive types, but cost much more per GB of storage space. Windows 7 includes support for TRIM, which optimizes SSD performance. SCSI drives are still around, too, notably in the form of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) with super fast access times — but they’re expensive and noisy and used primarily for servers.
